Andrea Hornick: New Work 1435-1783

Sears Peyton Gallery is pleased to present Andrea Hornick's first solo exhibition with the gallery, New Work 1435-1783. The show is on view November 10 - December 17 at Sears-Peyton Gallery in their Chelsea location at 210 Eleventh Avenue. Exhibitions are open to the public Tuesday-Friday from 11am-5pm and Saturdays from 12-5pm. For more information or a PDF preview, please contact the gallery at info@searspeyton.com. A print catalog with the essay below will be available at the opening.

 

Hornick is an artist working in painting, sound, and text, generated with syncretic ritual practices. For this exhibition, each of the portraits on view is a copy of an old masters’ portrait of a woman with an imagined animal inserted. Hornick weaves the images together so that the animal transforms the sitter, changing the atmosphere and empowering her presence as a subject rather than an object.

 

Hornick researches the materials and processes of the master painter, including the historical context for the portrait commission – a man paying for a portrait of a woman, to display prestige. Each work take months to paint. The artist works with conservators to perfect the making and application of traditional gesso and varnish recipes, pigments and oil mediums. Rendered in the sitter’s palette, the animals sit in a liminal space, and express what the woman and the painter omitted.Text panels for each painting will contain narratives from the point of view of the animal's first encounter with the woman sitter.

 

As critic Gretchen Bakke notes, introducing a conversation between Hornick and the anthropologist Timothy Ingold in Designs for the Anthropocene, featured in Public Books: “Hornick’s women and animals are so tightly bound that, sometimes, the creature seems like clothing to the woman, other times, the woman more like setting (than person) to the animal…Hornick’s paintings are gorgeous and silly…a kind of force or perhaps a capacious gust of capacities.”

 

Andrea Hornick (born 1970) holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also studied at the New York Studio School. Unbounded Histories, 2017, was a sound project at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia - the first contemporary work in their Collection Galleries. She is currently represented by Sears Peyton Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. She has had one person exhibitions at David Krut Projects, NY; Savery Gallery, Philadelphia; and Jen Bekman, NY. A discussion between Hornick and the anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has just appeared on Public Books. Other articles, interviews, and reviews have been in Hyperallergic, Artsy, LA Times, NPR, Philadelphia Enquirer, and elsewhere. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 – 2021, and has taught at Barnard College, Oberlin College, Auckland University (NZ), and as a Museum Teacher at The Jewish Museum, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Morgan Library, and the American Museum of Natural History. Hornick lives in Berlin and New York.