Jenny Holzer | STATEMENT – Truisms + | Auckland Art Gallery
Exhibitions
Jenny Holzer’s text works, called Truisms, were first executed as pithy and sometimes provocative slogans on the streets of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s as stickers, t-shirts and posters, with the intention of taking art out of the museum and into public life. Holzer quickly converted these statements to the media of advertising and public communication with a series of pivotal LED signs, most famously in New York’s Times Square.
Holzer’s use of electronic technology is, she says, motivated by ‘needing to be where people look’. Hanging suspended from the ceiling of the Gallery’s South Atrium, in STATEMENT – Truisms +, 2015 iconic statements like ‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’ and ‘ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX’ cascade and flash in speech-like pulsating rhythms and rainbow spectrums of colour, seemingly with a life of their own.