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At Hauser & Wirth London, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the city in a decade transforms language, repetition, and glass into a study of perception under pressure
Hope is usually treated as something bright, clean, and forward-facing. In Roni Horn’s world, it becomes stranger than that: heavy, repetitive, unstable, almost paralysing.
For her first solo exhibition in London in a decade, Horn returns to Hauser & Wirth with Seizure of Hope, an intimate but psychologically charged presentation running from May 21 to August 1, 2026. The show brings together drawings, sculpture, and one of the artist’s cast-glass works, continuing her long investigation into language, identity, repetition, and the slippery nature of perception.
At the centre of the exhibition is a new series of works on paper built around the phrase “I am paralyzed with hope.”The line, taken from a monologue by comedian Maria Bamford and previously used by Horn in her installation LOG, becomes the show’s emotional engine. Written, repeated, overwritten, and worn down across the page, the sentence starts to lose its simplicity. It becomes less like a statement and more like a pressure system.
That is where Horn’s work becomes so powerful. Repetition does not clarify the phrase; it destabilises it. The words blur, accumulate, and erode, until language starts behaving like thought itself — circular, fragile, obsessive, difficult to hold still. In Horn’s hands, drawing is not just image-making. It becomes a record of attention, hesitation, and psychic weather.
The exhibition also includes Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”), a cast-glass cube from 2022. At first, the object appears almost fixed: solid, minimal, contained. But as light moves across it, the surface becomes difficult to read, hovering somewhere between weight and liquidity. It has the strange quality of water pretending to be architecture.
That instability has always been central to Horn’s practice. Whether working with text, photography, drawing, or glass, she often returns to the idea that identity and perception are never singular. They shift depending on context, repetition, proximity, weather, language, and the body of the person looking. Nothing is quite as stable as it first appears.
With Seizure of Hope, that instability becomes emotional. Hope is not presented as a cure, or a sentimental escape from difficulty. It is something more complicated: a force that can sustain, disturb, overwhelm, and immobilise. The title itself suggests both grasp and rupture — a moment when hope takes hold, but also when it exceeds control.
An accompanying publication, Seizure of Hope, will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in 2026, extending the exhibition’s logic into print rather than simply documenting it. Like the works themselves, the book becomes another surface where language can repeat, shift, and refuse to settle.
In the end, Horn’s exhibition asks us to sit with the discomfort of wanting something intensely without knowing whether it will arrive. Hope, here, is not soft. It is a vibration, a sentence, a surface, a block of glass catching light — beautiful, difficult, and impossible to fully trust.