Jenny Holzer valuation
Puts language in public — on posters, LED signs, stone benches and buildings — and lets it argue with the passer-by.
Jenny Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1950, studied at Ohio University and at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she took her MFA in 1977, and joined the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program the same year.
What a work by Jenny Holzer is worth
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Bio
Jenny Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1950, studied at Ohio University and at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she took her MFA in 1977, and joined the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program the same year. Her first public work, the Truisms of 1977 to 1979, was a list of one-line statements — Abuse of power comes as no surprise, Money creates taste — printed anonymously on posters and pasted up around Manhattan; the Inflammatory Essays and the Living and Survival series followed. From the early 1980s she moved the texts onto electronic signs, including the Spectacolor board in Times Square, and then onto carved stone benches, plaques, T-shirts and, from the 1990s, light projections across the faces of buildings and landscapes. In 1990 she was the first woman to represent the United States alone at the Venice Biennale, and her installation won the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion.
Her LED signs are sculptures with electronics and programming inside: a sign must come with its control system, its programme and the studio's documentation, and should be checked as working, and many are editioned. The carved benches and footstools, in granite or marble, are usually editioned too. Paintings based on declassified government documents, from the mid-2000s on, and prints, posters and smaller multiples come up as well. Provenance through her galleries, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth among them, settles most questions.
Gallipolis, Times Square and The Venice Installation
The Venice Installation filled the American pavilion in 1990 with LED signs and with marble benches and floors carrying her texts in several languages; works from it carry in their titles the room and wall they were made for.
Her series include Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, Living, Survival, Under a Rock, Laments and Mother and Child, and the Redaction Paintings made from declassified documents.
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