For her first solo exhibition in London in a decade, Roni Horn presents new, previously unseen works on paper from her Seizure of Hope series. The works explore one of Horn’s great obsessions: repetition, language, and the written word as a material in itself.

The exhibition centres on drawings made with coloured wax pencil and graphite on paper, where text becomes image, rhythm, pressure and uncertainty. The repeated phrase — “I am paralysed with hope” — appears again and again, shifting between statement, mantra, wound and resistance.

Alongside the drawings, the show includes one of Horn’s rare cast-glass sculptures, a cube-like object that brings weight, reflection, transparency and silence into dialogue with the fragility of the works on paper.

Because Seizure of Hope captures a very contemporary emotional state: the feeling of being overwhelmed by politics, climate, fear and uncertainty — but still unable to let go of hope.

Horn’s work is quiet, but never simple. She does not use language to explain; she uses it to destabilise. A repeated sentence becomes less clear the more you see it. Hope becomes something physical, almost exhausting. Not optimism. Not comfort. A kind of tension you have to live with.

For Artlovers, this is worth seeing because it is a compact but powerful London show: minimal, intelligent, intimate, and deeply in tune with the emotional temperature of now.

Don’t read the phrase only once.

Let repetition do its work. Look at how the handwriting changes, how the spacing shifts, how the surface carries pressure and hesitation. Then move to the glass sculpture and notice the opposite energy: stillness, density, reflection.

This is not a loud exhibition. It asks for slow attention — and gives back something strange: the feeling that hope can be both fragile and heavy.