I have always wanted to write ecstatic, fantastic things [...] as if I were mad, in some exalted state. — Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer’s art begins with a deceptively direct proposition: language is never merely a vehicle for meaning. It arrives already charged with authority, habit, persuasion and desire; its tone can make an assertion sound like common sense, a warning, a confession or a command. Since the late 1970s, Holzer has made these conditions visible by moving words through the systems that ordinarily govern public attention: posters, advertising displays, electronic signs, stone inscriptions, paintings and architectural projections. Her work examines how ideas acquire force, how statements become credible, and how the words encountered in public life enter the private theatre of thought.
Born in Gallipolis, Ohio, on July 29, 1950, Holzer first studied at Duke University from 1968 to 1970 and the University of Chicago from 1970 to 1971. She received a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University in 1972, then an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. Her early training was in visual art, and painting remained an important point of reference even as she began to question the limits of image-making. During the mid-1970s she moved to New York and took part in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.