Jenny Holzer

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art proudly announces a major exhibition of internationally renowned American artist Jenny Holzer opening on Friday 5 March 2010. In 2002 Holzer participated in the B.4.B pre-opening programme, projecting her haunting texts onto facades throughout Tyneside. For her new exhibition, the artist will present work spanning the last two decades, filling two floors of BALTIC’s galleries. Including painting and sculpture alongside her spectacular LED installations, the exhibition is Holzer’s largest and most comprehensive for fifteen years and the first its scale to be shown in the UK.

Best known for her use of text as art, Holzer combines an investigative use of language with an innovative use of materials and modes of distribution – LEDs, billboards, marble benches, T-shirts, condom wrappers, projections and, most recently, paintings - to confront some of the most potent issues of our time: love, pain, peace, longing, conflict and survival. One of the earliest works in the exhibition, Lustmord Table (1994), was triggered by events during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Human bones, some wrapped with silver bands engraved with text, are ordered and presented on large wooden tables, articulating one of the artist’s most transparent engagements with the physical and psychological aspects of violence and trauma.

This exhibition is co-organized by the Beyeler Museum, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Major support for Jenny Holzer is provided by Donald and Brigitte Bren, Anne and Burt Kaplan, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jenny Holzer