Channa Horwitz: Language Series

Channa Horwitz: Language Series opens Saturday, November 19th with a reception for the artist from 6-8 pm. The exhibition continues through December 23rd, 2005. SolwayJones is located at 5377 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm.

Language Series, a work that began in concept in 1964 (though it was never executed until now), is an exhibition of multiple groups of paintings derived from a series of pictograms originally created by the artist to function as a language. With Language Series, the artist has created two-dimensional drawings and paintings that are controlled and composed as a deductive logic system, wherein the graph becomes a measure for several different opposing forces. Dark-Light, Large-Small, Multiple- Singular, Circle-Square and Positive-Negative each experience an evolution through intersection with the others, thereby creating a unique logic system. In Horwitz’s words, “I experience freedom through the limitations and structure I place on my work.”

What Horwitz calls “visual philosophy” could also be referred to as a visual game of sorts. For instance, the construct might look like this: (1) Randomly position two rectangles (one large and one small) against a broad field. (2) Draw a circle around the circumference of each of the rectangles. (3) Draw a circle in the center of the entire frame. (4) Color the portion of each rectangle falling outside circle #3 a darker shade. With the resulting visual offering and the controlled rules by which it was achieved, Horwitz managed early in her career to arrive at the essence of minimalism in her search within concept art.

According to Chris Kraus, “…Horwitz is an extrapolationist of simple logic. No matter how nearly ungraspably complex and numerous the variations become, nearly all of this artist’s work can be traced back to the grid.”

Channa Horwitz’s work was recently included in the exhibition Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s curated by Lynn Zelevansky, at the LA County Museum of Art (traveled to the Miami Art Museum in Florida).

For this exhibition, the gallery will publish a sixty four-page catalog with an essay by Chris Kraus.

Channa Horwitz: Language Series