ART REVIEW

With the summer heat settling in for a prolonged stay, art museums are a wonderful place of escape — not only are they amply air-conditioned (with someone else paying the bills), but they have many works of art that are as aesthetically cooling as the air around them.

For me, the best museum exhibition for a summer day — or, when it’s open, evening — is the Roni Horn exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center. It lasts through Aug. 20, so don’t put it off too long.

Horn is a sculptor in full maturity.

The New York native graduated with an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1978 and has had an active career in many mediums — drawing, photography, book arts, installation and, more traditionally, sculpture — the latter defined as static artist-designed objects occupying space.

The Nasher exhibition concentrates on recent glass “sculpture,” which is installed in the beautiful natural light of the Nasher’s main-floor gallery by the artist, working with the Nasher’s curatorial and installation The result is deceptively simple, encouraging quiet meditation and transforming the viewer almost into a dancer who moves about the ample spaces among the eight cylindrical glass sculptures.

Each is made of cast glass in a German fabrication studio used for years by the artist.

Each is its own color; each the height of an average adult human torso, so that only our heads can look down into their ample centers.

The colors are cool and, although the outsides of the cylinders have a slightly grainy texture, the tops are shiny with circular depressions that suggest that the cylinders were rotated at high speed when molten. The shiny tops have the apparent wetness of water, and Renzo Piano’s patterned ceilings make fabulous reflected patterns as if in revolving colored pools.

What is fascinating for us in summertime Dallas is to know that much of Horn’s aesthetic derives from her numerous trips to Iceland, a geologically young landscape with a unique combination of fire and ice.

This sense of blue and greenish pools of hot water in the frozen landscape is captured perfectly in several of the cylinders at the Nasher.

The Nasher’s label suggests that these sculptures link the generation of minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd, with whom Horn once collaborated, with the post-Minimalist generation like Felix Gonzalez- Torres, who dedicated work to Horn. While reassuring to art historians, such notions have little interest to the rest of us, who will find these sensuous, simple objects at once reductive and suggestive.

Pale lavender, the iciest of blues, the white of fallen snow, the pale gray of clouds, the yellowish green of glazed Chinese porcelain. The colors of the eight cylinders are so seductive and so difficult to name that they become mysteries in themselves.

The shapes are so simple that we can know them easily as they float on the Nasher’s floor.

The fact that they are at once massively heavy and fragile never occurs to us. They are glass embodiments of warm water, cold air and ice.

Rick Brettell is the founding director of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Plan your life

“Roni Horn,” exhibition continues at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., through Aug. 20. nashersculpturecenter.org.