"Diana Horowitz: Light is a Place" Reviewed in The New York Sun

Latest Diana Horowitz Exhibition Confirms That an Artist’s Mojo Can Accumulate in Strength and Nuance
Mario Naves | March 10, 2025

For her third solo exhibition at Bookstein Projects, Horowitz is displaying 30 pieces depicting vistas of places both far afield and close to home. Her paintings are small but their purviews are large.

Diana Horowitz: Light Is A Place’
Bookstein Projects, 39 E. 79th St., 4th Floor
Until April 18

The painter Diana Horowitz gets around. For her third solo exhibition at Bookstein Projects, Ms. Horowitz is displaying 30 pieces depicting vistas of places both far afield and close to home, from Banner, Wyoming — population 1,300 — to the significantly more populated New York City. Souvenirs from Italian sojourns are plenty, with Venice, Bellagio, and Siena among the cities Ms. Horowitz has seen fit to limn, as well as from less frequent stops at Massachusetts.

Ms. Horowitz’s paintings are small, with the biggest of them being about the size of a sheet of printing paper, but their purviews are large. With the exception of two pictures of goats seen up-close-and-personal, the vantage point is from a distance. Whether it’s the regulated skyline of Manhattan or the gently chiseled slopes of the Bighorn Mountains, each composition takes in an entirety of land, space, and atmosphere. From the evidence on hand, Ms. Horowitz prefers afternoons and diffuse skies.

Ms. Horowitz paints on-site — no second-hand source materials for her, thank you — and works in the tradition of alla prima, or “wet-on-wet.” Typically, this approach is resolved in a single, uninterrupted session and is reliant on the malleability of oils, a medium whose drying time can take days and sometimes weeks. Spontaneity of response is a necessity, as is a degree of foolhardiness: Is it at all possible to render in one go the encompassing space of our purple mountains’ majesty?

An artist has to have chutzpah to attempt such a thing, particularly given how quickly oils can turn into muddy slurs of color. Concomitantly, a painter has to bring a corresponding sense of humility when taking in the grandeur and variety of the natural world. Among the deftest hands at alla prima was a 19th-century British landscapist, John Constable. His oil sketches, the studies of clouds in particular, are miracles of painterly exposition.

Ms. Horowitz would be the first to pooh-pooh any such comparison — her modesty is there to glean from the self-effacing character of the canvases — but that’s not to say she isn’t taking inspiration from the big leagues. 

The paintings of Italy, whether the environs are natural or manmade, bring to mind similar panoramas by a French painter, Camille Corot, among the first artists to step outside of the studio and work in the fresh air. The tawny meditations of Giorgio Morandi are in the mix as are, to some extent, those of Paul Cezanne. The latter’s insistence that nature be treated by “means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” is there to see in Ms. Horowitz’s use of geometry as a compositional underpinning.

At moments, the paintings achieve a concision reminiscent of haiku. “Cows in Banner, WY” (2024) isn’t much larger than an index card, but its attention to form is sharp and swift. Ms. Horowitz’s hand moves with assurance in setting up the grassy foreground: We can almost hear the swooshing of her brush. The milky strains of gray and blue defining the sky are more persnickety in cadence, but the two-dozen cows punctuating the mountain pass are laid down with a breathless economy. Ms. Horowitz puts on a good show.

Morandi is name-checked in the “Sant’Oreste, for Morandi” (2024), with its high sepulchral light and uncanny stillness. As for our fair city, rarely has it been as flinty and ethereal — a tough combo, that — than in “Upper Manhattan, Haze” (2021). The least convincing of the pictures depict fireworks: Night time may not be the right time for Ms. Horowitz. 

The other 29 pieces? They go to confirm that an artist’s mojo can accumulate in strength and nuance with time and experience. This is Ms. Horowitz’s strongest group of paintings to date.