About the Artist:

Jenny Holzer was born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. She received a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, in 1972, and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1977. Holzer then moved to New York and enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year, she created her first text-based works, initiating an ongoing artistic investigation of language in which she presents both original and appropriated texts to deconstruct how personal and political meaning are created in Western culture’s patriarchal, consumer-oriented society.

For Truisms, her series comprising terse one-liners written between 1977 and ’79, and Inflammatory Essays, which were composed between 1979 and ’82, Holzer anonymously pasted posters of unswerving, declarative statements around New York City. Since then her text-based work has evolved in numerous mediums. In the 1980s Holzer used electronic signs to present her work in such prominent public spaces as Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London, as well as in sport stadiums. She began producing engraved marble and granite benches, initially bearing text from Under the Rock (1986), and stone sarcophagi inscribed with Laments (1988–89), a moving reflection on the devastating repercussions of the AIDS crisis. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and was awarded the Golden Lion for her Venice Installation, where she presented a series of her writings—including Mother and Child (1990), an account of motherhood—incised on a marble floor and emanating from LED signs.

Holzer has produced public memorials as well as outdoor nighttime projections, such as Arno (1996), presented on the surface of the Arno River in Florence. Her texts have also been projected on Rio de Janeiro’s cityscapes and oceans (Xenon for Rio de Janeiro, 1999), on beach shores and mountainsides (For San Diego, 2007), and on building facades across the world. Most recently, Holzer has returned to her earlier practice of using declassified American government documents as a subject for her art. Silkscreened on oil-painted backgrounds, these new works denounce acts of brutality and military practices conducted during the Iraq war. Holzer designed the granite paver installation at the New York City AIDS Memorial, which opened in 2016, and has presented two subsequent programs at the Memorial, including #LightTheFight (2018) and Urge and Urge and Urge (2020).

Holzer has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (1984); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1988); Dia Art Foundation, New York, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (both 1989–90); Haus der Kunst, Munich (1993); Art Tower Mito, Japan (1994); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1997); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001, 2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2004); MAK, Vienna (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2008–09; travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art [2009], and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland [2009–10]); Tate Modern, London (2018–19); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2019), and the Musée D’Orsay, Paris (2026), among other institutions. Her works have appeared in Documenta (1982, 1987); Whitney Biennial (1983, 1985); Carnegie International (1985); Sculpture Project, Münster (1987); Venice Biennale (1990, 2005, 2007, 2015); Florence Biennial (1996); Singapore Biennial (2006); and Gwangju Biennial (2012). She has been the recipient of several important awards, and in 2016 she was made an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She lives and works in New York.