JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Left-over Paint Abstraction #3 (70” x 60”)
2022
Acrylic on linen
70 by 60 in. 177.8 by 152.4 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Best Picture
2020
2-channel video
Dimensions variable, Duration 11 min 30 sec
Jonathan Horowitz
Your Land / My Land / Your Land / My Land
2020
Silkscreen on mirrors with metal frames
Each panel: 36 1/4 by 60 1/4 by 7/8 in. 92.1 by 153 by 2.2 cm
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Power
2019
Digital C-print, mounted on aluminum, back mounted to Diasec
15 by 79 7/8 by 1 3/8 in. 38.1 by 202.9 by 3.5 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Coke/Pepsi (488 containers)
2019
UV ink on vinyl
88 by 75 in. 223.5 by 190.5 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Left-over Left-over Paint Abstraction, Left-over Paint Abstraction
2017/2021
Acrylic on linen
55 1/4 by 55 1/4 in. 140.3 by 140.3 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Tennyson, Jasper and Bob
2014
UV ink on canvas, embroidery, frame
74 11⁄16 by 49 5⁄16 by 2 3⁄16 in. 189.8 by 125.3 by 5.6 cm
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Three Rainbow Flags for Japer in the Style of the Artist’s Boyfriend
2005
Glitter and oil on linen
31 by 45.75 by 5 in. 78.74 by 116.205 by 12.7 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Tofu on Pedestal in Gallery
2002
Tofu, water, glass dish, Formica pedestal
46 by 15 by 15 in. 116.84 by 38.1 by 38.1 cm.
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
The Soul of Tammi Terrell
2001
2-channel video sculpture: 2 DVDs, 24-inch TV, 20-inch TV, 2 DVD players, 2 grey metal stands, synch box
Duration: 4:24/continuous
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Maxell
1990
Single-channel, VHS video for projection or monitor
Duration: 6:30
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Je T’Aime
1990
Single-channel, VHS video for projection or monitor
Duration: approximately 10:20 minutes/continuous
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of The Future Will Follow the Past: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2022
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, the Jewish Museum, New York, 2020-2021
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, the Jewish Museum, New York, 2020-2021
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of 1612 Dots by Jonathan Horowitz, The Oculus, World Trade Center, New York, 2017
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Occupy Greenwich, The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, CT, 2016
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Occupy Greenwich, The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, CT, 2016
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Group Self-portraits in ‘Mirror #1 (Six Panels), Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, 2013
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Jonathan Horowitz. Your Land / My Land: Election ’12, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Your Land/My Land: Election ’12, The New Museum, New York, 2012
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, 2010
JONATHAN HOROWITZ
Installation view of Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or, MoMA PS1, New York, 2009
b. 1966, New York
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce the representation of Jonathan Horowitz. Since the early 1990s, Jonathan Horowitz (b. 1966, New York) has made art that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. Often based in both popular commercial and art historical sources, his work across mediums examines links between consumer culture and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art.
Horowitz studied philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and at the beginning of his art making career, he worked professionally as a music video editor. His early artwork, primarily in video, reflects the influences of both experimental film and Hollywood movies. Often taking the form of video sculptures in which consumer televisions are configured on industrial, grey metal stands, the work is rare in its combination of structuralist rigor and deeply felt pathos. Other early works utilize images downloaded from the Internet or simple texts printed on 8.5 by 11-inch office paper in a form of lo-fi, DIY computer art.
In subsequent years, Horowitz employed other mediums—installation, painting, sculpture, photography—to explore subjects ranging from vegetarianism to the American political process. Additionally, Horowitz turned an eye to art history, most notably in a series of paintings based on Roy Lichtenstein’s mirror paintings and a series based on Jasper Johns's flag paintings. At the same time, Horowitz continued to work in video, weaving together strands of found footage to create complex, multilayered, narratives.
Whether through credited assistants, public participation, or curatorial projects, several bodies of work by Horowitz involve the participation of others in their making. For example, his “Dot” making exhibitions have employed the hands of thousands of people in the creation of monumentally scaled painting installations. Characteristic of Horowitz’s career, such projects reflect a commitment to authorial transparency, political engagement and a humanist ethos.
In his most recent painting project, “Left-over Paint Abstractions,” Horowitz goes from recycling media and art history to recycling material—namely paint salvaged from other artists. Restricted to this found color palette, and in an ever evolving sampling of Abstract Expressionist styles, Horowitz creates densely textured new works from a readymade language of painting. Horowitz’s most recent curatorial project, “The Future Will Follow the Pasts: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz,” situates current social and political crises within the context of the permanent, narrative display of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. The exhibition runs through the end of 2022.
Solo exhibitions include the curatorial project We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, the Jewish Museum, New York (2020-21); 1612 Dots, The Oculus, World Trade Center, New York (2017); Occupy Greenwich, The Brant Foundation, Connecticut (2016); Your Land/My Land: Election '12, presented concurrently at seven museums across the US, from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles to the New Museum, New York (2012); Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2010-11); Apocalypto Now, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2009); the retrospective, And/Or, MoMA PS1, New York (2009); and Jonathan Horowitz/Silent Movie/MATRIX 151, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Connecticut (2003).
Horowitz’s work is held in the collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; S.M.A.K (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst), Ghent, Belgium; the Tate, London; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.
As Jonathan Horowitz's powerful special exhibition -- which addresses antisemitism, racial violence, immigration, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights -- grows in relevance, Philadelphia's Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History (The Weitzman) announces that it has been extended through July 4, 2023. Originally scheduled to run through December 2022, "The Future Will Follow the Past: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz", is a transformative art exhibition that explores the significant changes America has experienced since 2020 and issues it has been grappling with for decades. "Jonathan Horowitz's exhibition continues to grow in relevance since the Museum reopened in May," said Dr. Josh Perelman, The Weitzman's Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Interpretation.
In 1942 Ben Shahn, employed by the United States Office of War Information to create propaganda in support of the Allied cause, borrowed imagery from his fellow artists for a series of five posters depicting the “methods of the enemy.” “Suppression” was represented by Edward Millman’s We Must Win!, 1942–45, a rendering of a gaunt visage gagged by a swastika-emblazoned cloth; Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Torture, 1943, featured a scarred muscular figure whose hands are bound behind his back. Käthe Kollwitz’s 1923 lithograph of begging children allegorized “starvation,” while Bernard Perlin’s exquisite lifeless female head provided an unsettling emblem for “murder.” For his contribution, titled Slavery, Shahn adapted his own 1935 Resettlement Administration photograph of Sam Nichols, a white tenant farmer in Boone County, Arkansas. In the illustration, the artist deepens his subject’s skin tone and fences him in with barbed wire. Conveying the war effort as part of a universal struggle for human dignity and liberation, the posters—deemed too challenging for their conceived purpose—were never reproduced. All five, however, are depicted side by side in Shahn’s gouache-and-tempera painting We Fight for a Free World!, ca. 1942, and appear as though they’ve been tacked onto a brick wall graffitied with the canvas’s title.
This work inspired “We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz.” Invited by the Jewish Museum in 2017 to respond to the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence in the US, Horowitz, following Shahn’s example, expanded the curatorial scope to embrace broader movements against racism, oppression, and ethnonationalism, presenting his own art in heteroglossic congress with work by more than seventy contemporary and historical artists.
Jonathan Horowitz’s art has long turned a critical eye toward American politics, but it took on new urgency in the Trump era. His altered photographic image of the former president golfing into a fiery hellscape became an instant symbol of our apocalyptic political era, with critic Jerry Saltz suggesting it become Trump’s “official presidential portrait to hang in all federal buildings, courthouses, and post offices.”
Most recently, Horowitz organized a timely exhibition at the Jewish Museum, titled “We Fight to Build a Free World” (through February 14), which looks at artistic responses to authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and racism throughout history, including work by artists such as Kara Walker, Judith Bernstein, and Glenn Ligon.
In the early 1940s, the artist Ben Shahn created a painting for the Office of War Information with images depicting suppression, starvation, slavery, torture and murder. He called it “We Fight for a Free World!” The painting was supposed to lead to a series of propaganda posters, but the government rejected the project. Still, the original painting survived and has a new life today as the heart of a show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan: “We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz.”
The exhibition, which is to run from March 20 through Aug. 2, examines the ways that artists have taken on issues like oppression, intolerance and authoritarianism, and raises questions about anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia. With about 80 works in a range of media, the Jewish Museum covers a great deal of ground in sometimes startling ways.
Appropriation has by now become such an established aesthetic sub-industry in contemporary art that a roomful of copied Lichtenstein mirror paintings can seem snooze-worthy, but the conceptual artist Jonathan Horowitz—known most recently for his essential Trump-golfing-amid-the-apocalypse photo—has a nifty agenda behind this installation. Distributing an image of one Lichtenstein that he found on the web, Horowitz enlisted different artists in the New York area to reprise the painting by hand, using only paints and a brush and no digital tools. The result, as you can see in these 13 paintings, is that each version is subtly different (or not so subtly, in the case of one that goes a little crazy with the dots), acting as a mirror of sorts of each artist’s indexical hand.
New York Frieze Week has arrived just in time for Spring, bringing with it a flurry of fairs, exhibitions and can’t-miss art world events all across the city. But one of the week’s most exciting participatory art projects won’t be found inside the snake-shaped tent on Randall’s Island. No, artist Jonathan Horowitz will be setting up a public studio for passersby to paint black dots inside Westfield World Trade Center’s Oculus transit hub in Lower Manhattan.
Horowitz’s participatory art installation, called 1612 DOTS, is the newest iteration in a ongoing series, and the first major partnership the Oculus has done with an artist in its community programming series on the Oculus floor. Horowitz has previously staged the interactive work at venues such as the Swiss Institute in New York, 356 Mission in Los Angeles and 2015’s Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s, which is where I had the opportunity to try my own hand at completing the not-so easy task.
A few years ago, New York artist Jonathan Horowitz found himself with “many, many half-full cans of strange-colored paint,” he says—surplus from an earlier project. So he decided to see what he could do with them. At first he mostly dabbed the paint around the center of canvases, but he soon began flinging with abandon, splattering every inch of the surfaces, not to mention the walls of his Bronx studio. The resulting works are chromatic supernovas. “I never really know how they are going to turn out,” says the artist, who also notes that the pieces have an environmental conceit. “I see them as a repository for something that would have gone in a landfill.”
These “Leftover Paint Abstractions,” as Horowitz calls them, are making their debut in an exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, the Greenwich, Connecticut, museum established by megacollector Peter Brant. On view May 8 through October, the show focuses on the past decade of Horowitz’s 25-year career, during which he has addressed issues ranging from war to gay rights to animal welfare while routinely slinging sardonic arrows at consumer culture, the media, and celebrity. He’s known for cleverly mixing pop and politics, irony and earnestness, often incorporating art-historical references.
Jonathan Horowitz has really made a name for himself in the past few years by putting the art world to work. A new show at the Swiss Institute, running from January 13-17, is simply titled “160 Dots.” It is the third in his Dots series, which are works on canvas comprised of black dots painted, with precise instructions from the artist, by gallerygoers and eager fair-attendees.
The dot is a black hole and a simple mark, an infinite void and an eternal asshole, a pregnant period or simply a circle. This figure, which featured centrally in Jonathan Horowitz’s project, was first mentioned by omission—a classified listing in Night Papers’ Sex Issue that read simply, “SEEKING PARTICIPANTS for JONATHAN HOROWITZ PAINTING PROJECT . . . 30–60 mins, $20 PAID.” An odd and intriguing opportunity at first glance: Your everyday hustler might spot an easy mark and a quick Jackson, while the savvy economist might wonder about the exchange value for that labor. Animal-rights activist, video maker, recentish painter, and commissioner of copies in the service of art, of which this endeavor marked the latest such operation, Horowitz offered to pay any participant willing to contribute a painting of a black dot.
Jonathan Horowitz is a New York–based artist known for his often-sardonic examination of value systems in media, culture, and politics. Here, he discusses his Free Store, which he first presented in 2009 at Sadie Coles and has since recreated several times. The latest iteration of the store will be on view as part of Art Unlimited at Art Basel from on June 10 to 16, 2013. Horowitz will open an exhibition of new work at Barbara Weiss in Berlin on June 21, which will be on view until August 3, 2013.