Jenny Holzer Dust Paintings

Dust Paintings was an exhibition of painting by Jenny Holzer. A catalogue with an essay by the poet Henri Cole accompanies the exhibition.

Jenny Holzer has used government documents as a source for her work since 2004. Language has been Holzer’s primary medium since the late 1970s. Placed on electronic signs or stone benches, Holzer’s text investigates how ideas are transformed from argument or opinion into fact. While her work has a conceptual base, she involves her viewer through what’s intensely physical.

Turning to government documents in 2004, months after the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, Holzer tried to reconstruct the path to war from the language of its architects and executors. The documents painted most recently trace the political fallout and human wreckage in the global war on terror. Holzer’s new works, hand-rendered, return flesh to events.