To Place. 1-11 plus the Inner Geography supplement (all published to date).

complete signed set

A complete signed set of Roni Horn's epic and ambitious, ongoing encyclopedic series 'To Place'. Each volume deals with a different theme, and together they combine to build a portrait of both Iceland and the artist herself. Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975, and since then it has become the inspiration and location for much of her work. She explains her fascination as being because, 'Iceland is the place where I have the clearest view of myself and my relationship to the world. By clearest view, I mean a view that is not constricted by social conventions' (In Numbers).

In a 1995 interview with Claudia Spinelli for the Journal of Contemporary Art, Horn discussed the importance of this series and its place within her work: 'The entrance to all my work is the idea of an encyclopedia of identity. It is best represented by the books, the series called 'To Place', which is extremely important to me. I have been working on this since 1988. It's really the heart. It is a series of books, each one of which adds to the whole in a way that alters the identity of it retroactively. So the first volume appears to be a book of drawings. The second book was about a completely different subject but in the same format. With the third volume people start to realize something: "Well, this looks like a series, so there must be some relationship. But I haven't a clue as to what it is."... The books are this very slow process of accumulation in the period of a life, my life... The underlying subject stays the same: Iceland and myself, the viewer and the view. This is the dialectic that defines each in itself.'

To Place 1: Bluff Life. New York, Peter Blum Edition, 1990.
To Place 2: Folds. New York, Mary Boone Gallery, 1991.
To Place 3: Lava. [New York], [Self-published], 1992.
To Place 4: Pooling Waters (two vols). Cologne, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1994.
To Place 5: Verne's Journey. Cologne, Walther König, 1995.
To Place 6: Haraldsdóttir. Denver, Colorado, Ginny Williams, 1996.
To Place 7: Arctic Circles. Denver, Colorado, Ginny Williams, 1998.
To Place 8: Becoming a Landscape (two vols). Denver, Colorado, Ginny Williams, 2001.
To Place 9: Doubt Box. Göttingen, Steidl Verlag, 2006.
To Place 10: Haraldsdóttir, Part Two. Göttingen, Steidl Verlag, 2011.
To Place 11: Mother Wonder. Göttingen, Steidl Verlag, 2023.

First editions, each signed in pencil; 11 in 13 vols [nos. 1-7, 10-11] (260 x 208 mm, 10¼ x 8¼ in); photographs and reproductions of watercolour and graphite drawings; charcoal grey cloth-covered boards, titles stamped in black on spine and upper sides, coloured dots stamped on spines; [no. 8] (202 × 254 mm, 8 x 10¼ in); photo-illustrated perfect bound wrappers, publishers yellow cloth-covered board box, titles to upper side in black, light blue dot stamped to upper and to spine; [no. 9] 28 plates (202 × 254 mm, 8 x 10¼ in), publishers black cloth-covered board box, titles in black on upper side, white dot stamped to upper and to spine, minor fading to spine, [Inner Geography Supplement] (260 x 208 mm, 10¼ x 8¼ in), lightly toned printed grey perfect-bound wrappers, very minor rubbing to extremities of some volumes, corners of one volume gently tapped, publisher's announcement laid in to no. 8, a near-fine to fine set; various paginations.

The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present pp348-351; The Photobook: A History II, pp164-5; In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 pp386-393.