Roger Hiorns RA (b. 1975)

Roger Hiorns was born in Birmingham in 1975. He received his BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1996. His primary media is painting, sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood, brain matter, crystallization and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography.

Hiorns work is involved in the contemporary problem of identifying meaning and significance in the world. He involves himself in objects and behaviour that contradict the conditioned and appropriate approach to the art making of his forebears and his contemporaries.

Roger Hiorns’ sculptural work generates and inhabits interstices between dissentient ideas: construction and destruction; the theological and the technological; temporality and permanence; authoritarian control and organic spontaneity. His objects are threaded with an unease that ties them, and our experience of them, to the amorphous, unrelenting global anxiety which suffuses our everyday understanding and reality.

Hiorns has been featured in a number of exhibitions at institutions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the Biennale of Venice; MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and De Hallen, Haarlem.

Hiorns’ work is included in such institutional collections as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; and Tate Modern, London. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize for his critically acclaimed work, Seizure, a massive crystallization within the interior of a bedsit in a condemned South London council estate. In 2011, Seizure was acquired by the Arts Council Collection and is currently on a ten-year loan for exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Yorkshire, England. Hiorns has recently had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Centre PasquArt, Biel; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; and SNGMA, Edinburgh.

Hiorns lives and works in London.

Profile

Royal Academician

Sculptor

Born: 1975

Nationality: British

Elected RA: 13 December 2022

Gender: Male