Roni Horn. Seizure of Hope
A phrase repeated until it almost breaks: hope as language, drawing, paralysis, and survival.

Image credit
Roni Horn Seizure of Hope (81) 2025 Colored wax pencil, graphite on paper © Roni Horn Photo: Ron Amstutz
Meet the artist
The Movement
Contemporary ArtArtLovers Tip
Visit time / Density: Compact and focused. You can visit it in around 25–30 minutes, but allow 45 minutes if you want to stay with the repetition, the texture of the drawings and the glass sculpture properly.
A quiet London must-see for lovers of conceptual art, language and emotional precision — Roni Horn turning hope into something you can almost feel in your body.
Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see
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.
Worth the trip
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.
How to experience it
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.

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