Roni Horn and Georges Tony Stoll: Radical Portraiture at Paris Galleries

In spring 2002, two Paris galleries presented concurrent exhibitions exploring radical approaches to portraiture and the face. At Galerie Yvon Lambert (April 12–May 25), Roni Horn showed "You Are the Weather" (1996), a series of about sixty close-up portraits of a young Icelandic woman, Margrét, emerging from water. The work obsessively repeats the same face under varying weather and light conditions, refusing psychological depth or identity definition. Horn also exhibited the recent series "The Cabinet of" (echoing Caligari), featuring blurred, trembling forms on white backgrounds that coalesce into grotesque clown faces with red noses, mouths, and phallic noses, alongside photographs of Icelandic seas. At Galerie du Jour agnès b. (April 27–June 1), Georges Tony Stoll presented photographs of male bodies, often half-nude, with faces denied—masked by hoods or plastic bags, or shown from behind. His work operates in contradictions, moving between fiction and reality, and includes recurring motifs like bare bulbs, sneakers, and primary color bands. Stoll cites Diane Arbus and Weegee as influences, praising their "mad love for humans." Both artists, through different means, evacuate psychological interiority and challenge the conventional readability of the face, treating it instead as a surface for time, weather, or abstraction.