Channa Horwitz: Structures

Ghebaly Gallery is proud to present Structures, an exhibition of intricate, previously unseen drawings by the late Los Angeles artist Channa Horwitz. The exhibition focuses on the period from 1975 through 1985, a time in which Horwitz embarked on a new series called “Structures” that disassembled and analyzed her previous work, leading to new discoveries and opening fresh pathways that would guide the artist’s practice in the decades following. The works from the “Structures” series are presented alongside the pieces they would inspire, including several large scale and multipart works from the period.

Known for her tightly controlled approach to geometric abstraction, Channa Horwitz famously devised a drawing system in the late 1960s called Sonakinatography in which sound, motion, and space are tracked using beats of time graphed on eight-to-the-inch square grids. In each, the numbers one through eight are represented graphically by color or symbol and plotted according to an initiating set of rules that ultimately created her compositions. Sequencing, seriality, and iteration are all key dynamics in these works.

This notation system assumed a generative power within Horwitz’s practice, with new series spawning from existing ones like the branching of an evolutionary tree. With each alteration of the starting variables in the system, a new body of work arose. In some, multiple sequences are superimposed into a single drawing, as in the works from the Canon series. In others, like the works from the series “Slices,” sequences are visualized rotating in space and cross sectioned, “as if it was the front slice in a loaf of bread,” as she put it. Horwitz built her visual systems with an exacting rigor, yet was consistently guided by an openness to new possibilities embedded within her existing architectures.

The exhibition centers around the “Structures,” a series Horwitz began in the mid 1970s that reveals this openness. Describing this diverse body of work, Horwitz called the drawings “dissections.” Taking her layered, complex compositions of the previous decade as her starting point, she isolated specific passages to better understand the operations that lay beneath. As a result, these works act as keys that reveal the logics of the larger works also exhibited in the exhibition. These works give a preface to the large “Canon” and “Moiré” works that would populate Horwitz’s output through the 1980s. Exhibited here for the first time, these “Structures” provide valuable insight into how Horwitz built her mesmerizing and visually dense mid-career works.

Eulogizing Horwitz in the pages of Artforum, the writer Chris Kraus noted that “it is becoming ever more apparent that Horwitz’s simultaneous pursuit of extreme mathematical rigor and utter aleatory openness—when most artists of her generation chose one of the above—constitutes a unique vision,” one that combined an embrace of both abstract rules and the curious wanderings of lived experience. Indeed, the artist revealed in “Structures” is one searching for essences and guided by a simple yet vast observation, that, as she put it, “if I wanted to experience freedom, I need to reduce all of my choices down to the least amount.”

Channa Horwitz (b. 1932, d. 2013) lived and worked in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Lisson Gallery, New York; Raven Row, London; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and group shows including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, Brazil; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 55th Venice Biennale; Made In L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles; and New Museum, New York, among others. Horwitz’s work resides in significant public collections including MoMA, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; LACMA; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.