Channa Horwitz

Channa Horwitz’s practice was defined by a deployment of self-imposed rules, experiments with numerical sequence and explorations of systems and line. The artist’s fourth exhibition with Lisson Gallery showcases a more playful side of her rigorous practice and features a selection of drawings in ink, colored pencil, casein and gold leaf alongside rarely-shown, large-scale acrylic on canvas paintings.

Working in obscurity for the majority of her fifty-year career, Channa Horwitz maintained a resolute and distinctive schematic language that informed each body of work and the deep inquiries from which they developed. The exhibition focuses on works from 1984 – 2004, a period when the artist created from an already-ingrained set of parameters determined in the twenty years prior. Horwitz’s first artistic inquiry, Language Series, set the foundations of her guiding principles. The series introduced repetitive patterns and numerical groupings that were organized sequentially based on combinations of eight pictograms. In the Sonakinatography works, which followed in the late 1960s, the artist used her mathematic compositions to explore ways to track movement and time within her visual philosophy. Throughout Horwitz’s career, each new body of work evolved from the previous series. The resulting interrelated explorations in the years to follow yielded the Variations and Inversion on a Rhythm, Flowings, Structures, Eight Expanded and Canon series previously exhibited at Lisson Gallery London, and the Canon Moiré and Rhythm of Lines ll series that are the subject of this presentation.

The Canon and Moiré works in the exhibition, which share a common methodology and use of systems, exhibit a clear lineage to Horwitz’s first series. Around 1984 she realized that all of her work came down to eight angles of lines. Her subsequent exploration with varied dyadic combinations from her vocabulary of eight angles resulted in the “Moirés” body of work. This led to works that balanced a new relationship between a restraining methodology and a densely patterned and vibrant surface, such as Canon Twelve, Moiré Number 2 (1985) and Moiré Matrix (1985). In these works, eight different starting points on individual angles are assigned a specific color, a system similar to the processes in Sonakinatography. New rhythmic patterns are created at every intersection creating colorful vibrations across the surface.