Sharon Horvath: Small Myriad
January 11 – February 23, 2024
Reception: Thursday, January 11th 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 fourth solo show with the gallery.

Sharon Horvath creates paintings which move in perpetual fluidity: Figure, ground, color, and form interflow like rivers and land shaping each other. The visible and the hidden are layered and in flux. Her paintings convey the feeling of deep water that contains both one’s reflection as well as the void. In the shadows, delicate forms come into focus just below the surface. Things that first appeared solid, dissolve into ripples. But one gets the sense that these paintings were not created solely for the viewer’s eyes.

An arrangement of shapes, images and physical objects sit on the painting’s surface or embedded inside it. The objects, which may be immersed in the aqueous painted gestures or framed by compositional bubbles, appear as votive offerings. They are placed like food, coins, writings on clay fragments, or small statuary to be offered on an altar, cast into the water, or deposited in the ashes of a sacrifice.

Paintings, like altars, open a space of interface between this place and another. The physicality of a painting grounds it firmly ‘here’ while the metaphysicality of the image holds an energy and idea which resonates elsewhere. There is an electric tension between a painting’s here-ness and there-ness. The painted image must invoke magic to allow it to exist in both places simultaneously. To create an image is to transmogrify our experience of the infinite universe into the finite matter of pigment, paper, fabric, plastic, and wood. There is power in this transformation, and we thrill at the wonder of it.

Horvath’s paintings contain the stuff of everyday life. Her common materials connect with the uncommonness that exists in all things. In one painting, I inspect a mandala: Is it a collaged photograph of a cupcake that has been cut from a magazine? In another painting, an embedded circular object appears like a radiant form in an Emma Kunz drawing or Hilma af Klint painting. Is it a manifestation of the sacred geometry of the universe, or a piece of plastic packing material? I see that it is both and rejoice in the realization that my kitchen recycling bin is filled with sacred presence.

- Benjamin Degen, December 2023

Sharon Horvath (b. 1958, Cleveland, OH) received her BFA in from Cooper Union, New York and her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. She is a Professor of Art at Purchase College, SUNY. Horvath has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and abroad. Her numerous awards and grants include the Fulbright-Nehru U.S. Scholar Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant for Painting, the Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art 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 for Painting, the Edwin Palmer Prize in Painting from the National Academy Museum and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Sharon Horvath: Small Myriad will be on view from January 11 – February 23, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 11th 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.