Jenny Holzer's latest highly political works on display in New York City

From Sept. 8 to Oct. 29, 2022, the renowned Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York is dedicating a major exhibition to Jenny Holzer (Gallipolis, Ohio, 1950), titled Demented Words: the show will display Holzer’s most recent works, including paintings, her so-called curse tablets, and a monumental kinetic display containing tweets from the president of the United States. Jenny Holzer has used language as her primary medium since the 1970s, making use of poetic, political and personal texts to reflect on our experiences of power, violence, joy, idealism, foolishness, despair, fun and corruption.

Holzer’s debut at Hauser & Wirth New York sees the artist directly confronting the present moment, drawing on new and old political-cultural materials to illuminate contemporary life. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be the work WTF (2022), an electronic sign oscillating with tweets posted by Donald Trump during his presidency and posts by Q, leader of the conspiracy group QAnon. WTF is the latest in a series of experiments with kinetics, and it flows along a track with an unpredictable cadence that echoes the erratic pace at which the messages appeared online.

The flashing, scrolling texts illuminate nearly 300 curse tablets (“curse tablets”) that line the gallery walls and are scattered across the floor. This new body of work was inspired by engraved lead tablets used by ancient Romans to seek vengeance. Holzer’s tablets were created by printing tweets on metal fragments, then aging them through chemical baths, crumpling, bending, and drilling. Like the ruined or melted iterations of Holzer’s earlier evocations of public plaques, the damaged tablets suggest waste, scrap, and devastation. Together, the electronics and the quasi-archaeological tablets compose a time capsule of past and present, registering the hyperbolic and infuriating rhetoric that characterizes today’s political and media landscape, divisive language that matches or exceeds that employed in Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979-82).

The exhibition also presents a selection of new large-scale paintings on linen, marking the latest phase of Holzer’s painting practice, which analyzes and visualizes the ongoing and interconnected turmoil in American politics from the George W. Bush era to the present. The surfaces of these works are built on traces of enlarged pages of government documents, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and FBI documents related to the Patriot Act. Holzer meticulously covered the redactions and blank space with colored blocks of oil paint before adding layers of bright gold, platinum and other metal leaves.

Jenny Holzer

Born in 1950 in Ohio, USA, Jenny Holzer studied painting and printmaking at Ohio University and earned an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. She also undertook liberal arts studies at Duke University and the University of Chicago. a broad education that resonates throughout her multidirectional art practice. While her early efforts were devoted to painting, she quickly turned to text and dynamically incorporated new technologies to route her work into public space: Holzer’s work is as accessible on billboards, T-shirts, benches and electronics in New York’s Times Square as it is in museums and galleries.

Since 1996, Holzer has used light projections (in which powerful projectors project scrolling texts onto architecture or landscape) as another means of presenting writing in the public sphere. The texts and light are dramatic yet enigmatic, adapting to different surfaces, from mountains and ski jumping in Lillehammer to the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris. In the wake of 9/11, Holzer returned to painting, alluding to milestones such as Suprematism and Abstract Expressionism to reinforce the ongoing relationship between art and politics.

Jenny Holzer's latest highly political works on display in New York City

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