Closing out the Year: Sharon Horvath

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Though I’ll slip in some current reporting, I'm using this month to look back at exhibitions I loved but didn’t get a chance to write about as Miami was looming. Sharon Horvath’s Parts of a World at Lori Bookstein Fine Art was one of those exhibitions.

The painting just inside the front door--my favorite in the show-- with the full work below and a detail below that

At first her paintings look like pure abstraction—woozy grids, trusslike mazes, and a netlike celestial space, all dense with layers of marks and dots. I respond to these paintings emotionally first, formally only after the sensation of them settles in. Closer looking reveals that these are depictions, however attenuated, of places: paths, topographies, pools of light that turnout to be ballparks, of all things. Up close you get pulled in. I’ve included details. There are worlds within her worlds.

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Entering the gallery proper, with a closer view below of the painting on the back wall, and a detail below that


I have no title for this work, but I love it and the detail:
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Swinging around to the right: Afterlife, 2002-2009, dispersed pigment, polymer and collage on canvas, left
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The work for which I have no title, right, is shown in detail below
The layers are topographical and transparent, taking you deep with the visual structure of the painting
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Viewing Horvath's work gives you an opportunity to float above it, to float within it, to peek into and behind space. Clearly she achieved what she set out to do. This is part of her statement from the press release: “I’d like you to see a place as if you are hovering far above it, and at the same time digging in the ground. You are large, then you are small. When you are small you can enter into things. When you are large you can see more.”

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Foreground, Your Blue Loom, for Martin Ramirez, 2001, disperse pigment, ink and polymer on paper on canvas
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Detail below
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A peek into the smaller back gallery. The largest painting, July Mountain, was noted here previously
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By the way, those layers have a neat complement in real life: Horvath’s first solo show with the gallery took place in the gallery’s first show in its new locatioion, on 10th Avenue near 19th Street. Another neat complement: Here’s what I saw when I walked out and looked back at the gallery from across 10th Avenue:

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