Sharon Horvath
Sharon Horvath: Inviting the Bell
March 12 – April 17, 2026
Reception: Thursday, March 12th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Sharon Horvath. This is the artist's fifth solo show with the gallery.
In this new body of work, Horvath considers painting as a site of receptivity, where image, color, sound, and memory interflow. The exhibition takes its title from the Buddhist practice of “inviting the bell,” in which the sound of the bell functions not as interruption but as a call to return to presence. For Horvath, that gesture becomes both structure and subject: a signal to slow down and remember, I am here, I am home, and I am alive.
Horvath’s recent paintings move between abstraction and image, between the intimate scale of devotional objects and the larger psychic space of the painted field. Seed syllables, chant, and vibration—drawn from the artist’s ongoing study of Tibetan Buddhism—inform the work as visual and material forces. Color operates not simply as description, but as resonance. Shapes appear, dissolve, and recombine. Vertical formats suggest bodily channels, while surfaces built through pigment, polymer, paper, and photographic collage hold a layered sense of duration, accumulation, and transformation.
As throughout Horvath’s practice, disparate visual worlds are brought into charged relation. The paintings draw upon an American vernacular shaped by childhood in suburban Cleveland, where magazines, newspaper images, and picture files formed an early visual archive, even as they engage a broader field of artistic and spiritual reference. In these works, such sources—family image files, printed ephemera, seed catalogs, devotional forms, and fragments of contemporary imagery—are neither quoted nor illustrated so much as absorbed into a mutable pictorial language.
Horvath’s personal iconography has long made room for multiple histories at once. Here, echoes of visionary American painting, the mystical roots of early abstraction, Indian ledger paper traditions, and the synesthetic imagination of ragamala painting are gathered into compositions that feel at once intimate and expansive. The works proceed by accretion and recontextualization: forms are embedded, suspended, or set afloat within luminous, shifting grounds. What first appears fixed gives way to a more fluid state, as painting opens a space between the material and the metaphysical, the domestic and the cosmic, the seen and the intuited.
In Inviting the Bell, Horvath extends her longstanding interest in painting as a threshold—an object grounded here, yet capable of holding energies that point elsewhere. The exhibition asks for a slower kind of looking: one attentive to vibration, recurrence, and the subtle movement between image and awareness.
Sharon Horvath (b. 1958, Cleveland, OH) received her BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, and her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. She is Professor of Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY. Horvath has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and abroad. Her awards and honors include a Fulbright-Nehru U.S. Scholar Grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Award, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. Horvath lives and works in Brooklyn and Andes, New York.
Sharon Horvath: Inviting the Bell will be on view from March 12 – April 17, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 12th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.