Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Ohio, USA) is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since the late 1970s, her work has explored the interaction between language and power. Her best-known installations consist of texts placed in urban spaces using various media — LED displays, hand-painted signs, bronze plaques, posters, stone benches, and light projections. Such works can awaken viewers’ consciousness and catalyze critical thinking, puncturing the media landscape to which we have become so accustomed that we can fail to recognize reality.
The texts she uses, often presented in unadorned sans-serif letters, mainly consist of brief statements relating to everyday life, human hopes and fears, and, more insistently in recent years, violence and war.
In works created after September 11, 2001, Holzer began to take a more explicit interest in the new history of the United States, the war on terror, secret investigations, interrogations, and the loss of human lives in failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of late, she has expanded her scope to include investigations into foreign interference in US elections and the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. In her Redaction Paintings, she reproduces documents that have been released under the Freedom of Information Act, the law that guarantees public access to the US government’s records.
Often classified and not intended for public view, many of these documents have been redacted by the authorities before being published. Holzer enlarges the documents’ pages in oil on linen, frequently with the addition of metallic leaf. The result sheds light on the ambiguous relationships between power and secrecy and invites curiosity about the meaning and weight of words that, in their original context, are easily lost in the flow of information.
On display at Studio Trisorio are eleven works painted between 2019 and 2024. In these works, the redactions appear as black bars or transform into precious rectangles of gold leaf, resembling abstract paintings. In a related drawing on vellum titled Privately Constructed, the tracing of a document from the US Department of Homeland Security is surrounded by handprints made with charcoal.
In addition to these works, small metal plaques and drawings from Holzer’s Living and Survival series of the 1980s will be present, featuring pithy, incisive phrases that invite viewers to reflect on themes such as the fragility of life and the violence of war.
In the showcase at via Carlo Poerio 116, an LED sign and a marble bench inscribed with a line from a poem by Patrizia Cavalli will be exhibited.