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Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory essays 1979-1982.

Offset lithograph on coloured paper

This is a set of 10 prints, of which each print measures 25 x 25 cm

Unlimited Artist Proofs – with Certificate of Authenticity

Out of stock

This edition is published by ICA

Pick up at / ships in 5 to 10 business days from London (UK)

about this work

Originally fly-pasted around New York City, the impactful texts that make up Inflammatory Essay s spotlight Holzer’s ongoing concerns with power, social control, abuse, consumption and sex. The assertive and demanding statements are as biting and painfully prescient today as when they were first produced between 1979 and 1982.

The essays offered here were originally created for the ICA in 1993 during the inaugural years of the institute’s editions programme. They epitomise Holzer’s indelible mark and unique voice. Nine of the ten essays have been produced in the original font that Holzer initially used in 1979. One, Shriek , has been fabricated in the more instantly recognisable font for the essay sets that Holzer began to use later on in their production. This individual insertion distinguishes the prints offered here as being produced exclusively for the ICA. The sets come packaged in an original plastic sealed pocket.

about Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and installation artist whose work deploys text in public spaces across an array of media, including electronic and LED signs, carved stone, billboards, and printed materials. Closely aligned with the feminist art movement, Holzer’s oeuvre provokes public debate and illuminates social and political injustice. Celebrated for her inimitable use of language and interventions in the public sphere, Holzer creates a powerful tension between the realms of feeling and knowledge, with a practice that encompasses both individual and collective experiences of power and violence, vulnerability and tenderness.

Since 1996 Holzer has been using light projection – in which a powerful film projector casts scrolling texts onto architecture or a landscape – as another way of presenting texts in the public realm. The texts and light are dramatic but unobtrusive, adapting to varied projection surfaces, from the mountains and ski jump in Lillehammer to the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris. In recent years, Holzer has returned to painting, making reference to Abstract Expressionism and Suprematism and reinforcing the continued relationship of art with politics.

(courtesy of Hauser & Wirth)

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460. JENNY HOLZER | INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS

Contemporary Art Online | New York

JENNY HOLZER | INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS

March 10, 05:00 PM GMT

2,000 - 3,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

JENNY HOLZER

INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS

signed on the packing tube

21 offset prints on colored paper

Each sheet: 17 by 16⅞ in. (43.2 by 42.8 cm.)

Executed in 1979-82.

Condition report

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in March 1989

Inflammatory Essay (from Documenta 1982)

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Jenny Holzer Inflammatory Essay (from Documenta 1982) 1982

• Item Details
• Seller Information
• The 1stDibs Promise

About the Item

• Creator : Jenny Holzer (1950, American)
• Creation Year : 1982
• Dimensions : Height: 17 in (43.18 cm) Width: 17 in (43.18 cm)
• Medium : Lithograph , Offset
• Movement & Style : Conceptual
• Period : 1980-1989
• Framing : Framing Options Available Contact Gallery
• Condition : Good Very good condition.
• Gallery Location : Toronto, CA
• Reference Number : Seller: 12-22 1stDibs: LU215211399602

Jenny Holzer

Known for taking art out of the traditional “white cube” of galleries and museums and onto the streets, Jenny Holzer is one of the most potent feminist Neo- Conceptual artists of the 20th century. Her most iconic work critiques the information age and consumerism by reclaiming its primary media — conventional print billboards, storefront posters and LED signs.

“I used language because I wanted to offer content that people — not necessarily art people — could understand,” the Ohio-born Holzer told Interview magazine. She received her MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design , where her work was influenced by Abstract Expressionism . It was while in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art that Holzer became inspired to work at the intersection of public art and language.

In the late 1970s, after becoming an active participant in the downtown Manhattan artist collective Colab, which included Tom Otterness and Christy Rupp, Holzer began to create her legendary “Truisms” series. Printing anonymous one-line aphorisms in bold and italicized text on broadsheets, she pasted them up in public spaces all over New York City. The “Truisms” are provocative in questioning how we receive and process information. The work elicits debate and represents a range of perspectives. In an era that saw the rise of street art and graffiti, Holzer’s pithy word art would also find viewers by way of T-shirts, stickers and park benches, into which her slogans were carved.

Holzer’s more combative “Inflammatory Essays” (1979–82) took the form of mass-produced posters on colored paper — each featuring paragraphs as compared to the punch-line structure of “Truisms.” These touched on subjects such as violence, misogyny, power structures and consumerism, all of which have continued to be central in her work.

Starting in 1982 as part of a Public Art Fund project, Holzer projected “Protect me from what I want” and other “Truisms” on the Spectacolor board, a large computerized light signboard in New York City’s Times Square. Her “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” which has appeared on T-shirts as part of the series, has taken on new life in an increasingly politically divided America .

Just as it did in the 1970s, the forcefulness of her work continues to make both viewers and the art world stop and pay attention. She has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum , the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , the Tate Modern in London and elsewhere. She has also created permanent installations including the New York City AIDS Memorial. A 2014 show at New York’s Cheim & Read featured oil-on-linen canvases based on declassified government files pertaining to detainees from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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About The Work

Jenny Holzer is one of the most important and original artists of the 20th century.

Her body of work, with its emphasis on text, is provocative and occasionally frightening, manipulating the language of folk wisdom, pop culture, and government slogan to produce a commentary on global issues including power structures, gender struggle, economics, voting, and warfare.

Holzer's iconic "Inflammatory Essays", produced between 1979 and 1982, were first pasted on walls throughout heavily populated metro areas including New York, and shortly after in other cities. Unsigned and commercially produced, they subverted the conventions of advertising, graffiti, and public art. Each essay was in a different eye-catching color to maximize viewers' attention. It was also helpful when one Essay replaced an older one

The texts were derived from her childhood interest in rapturous writings. Holzer tried to emulate a similar style for her essays, yet borrowed from political theorists (notably Mao, Lenin, and Emma Goldman), anarchists, and religious fanatics.

The essays shift between multiple viewpoints and do not reflect Holzer’s own, but rather overall themes and styles are taken from her inspirations. The essay's tones are declarative, aggressive, urgent, and often menacing. 

Each essay contains exactly 100 words in 20 lines of text. The rigidity of this container format is juxtaposed against the extreme content exploding from the essay. It is worth emphasizing that these texts were frequently pasted on walls alongside or even covering conventional street advertising. 

Over the course of Holzer's career, the artist has continued to revisit the content and effect of the "Inflammatory Essays" and as such, they are like the cornerstone of her practice.  

The text for this powder blue Inflammatory Essay drips with both satire and terror. It presents a frightening flash of historical reality while explaining how to use the public execution of peasants to gain the compliance of the masses. Though created decades ago, Holzer's texts remain timeless and urgent - and perhaps more relevant and chilling than ever given today's political environment.

About Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist best known for her text-based works, which are constructed from "truisms" such as "abuse of power comes as no surprise" and "protect me from what I want." By experimenting with the use of words visually displayed in public spaces, Holzer is able to stimulate public discussions about violence, sexuality, oppression, human rights, feminism, …

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist best known for her text-based works, which are constructed from "truisms" such as "abuse of power comes as no surprise" and "protect me from what I want." By experimenting with the use of words visually displayed in public spaces, Holzer is able to stimulate public discussions about violence, sexuality, oppression, human rights, feminism, power, war, and death. Starting with street posters, Holzer's practice has come to incorporate LED screens that run with stock-ticker-like texts, painted signs, plaques, photographs, sound, video, and the Internet. Until 1993, Holzer wrote her own texts, after which she began to appropriate texts by Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and other champions of human rights, including Elfriede Jelinek, Fadhil Al-Azawi, Yehuda Amichai, and Mahmoud Darwish. Recent works include I Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade (2007), a series of oil on linen transcriptions of torture documents from the Iraq War; Redaction Paintings (2009), which were created using recently released classified memos with texts blacked out by censors; and an installation in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center. In 1990, she was the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for the best artist. In 2024, her solo exhibition Light Line debuted at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; a reimagination of Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. 

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Inflammatory Essay - Peasants

Offset lithograph

17.00 x 17.00 in

43.2 x 43.2 cm

This work comes with a Certificate of Authenticity.

• Ships in 5 to 7 business days from Canada.
• This work is final sale and not eligible for return.

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11 Jenny Holzer INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS Lithographs

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