Sabine Hornig
02 Dec 2011 - 29 Feb 2012
SABINE HORNIG
Still Life at Window
2 December, 2011 - 29 February, 2012
Parallel to her comprehensive exhibition, Durchs Fenster /Through the Window, at the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Alte Pinakothek, we are pleased to feature the second solo show by Sabine Hornig, from December 2 through February 18, 2012. The Berlin artist dissolves the boundaries separating photography, sculpture, and installation, allowing the everyday and the coincidental to interplay in her visual and spatial analogies.
Her first show at the gallery in 2005 featured a large slide of a curtained shop window, set into a wall separating two rooms of the gallery. Initially perceived as a mural, the transparency and change of perspective became apparent to viewers upon closer inspection. Hornig has been exploring this layering of abstract visual space and real space since 2001. Her process results in a multi-level visual construct consisting of transparency and reflection, uniting several views of a spatial situation on a two-dimensional level. With a background in sculpture, architectural and sculptural aspects are important to the artist. By construing the window pictures as objects and integrating them as photographic elements into her sculptures, Hornig creates hybrid forms that can be regarded as photo-sculptures. She emulates architectural details in sculpture and combines them with photographs to create new kinds of objects, leading to a new perspective of the interplay between objects and their materiality.
Another example is the sculpture Stilleben am Fenster / Still Life at Window, 2010: a semi-circular balcony wall is joined to two wooden window frames set at right angles to each other, which can be interpreted as picture frames. They are covered with transparent fabric printed with photographs of shop windows seen from the outside. Hornig creates a new space within the exhibition space, whose transparency simulates openness, yet the viewer is denied entry to it. The situation is similar in the small sculpture Hütte III / Hut III, 2009: a house of cards made of steel. This fragile looking architectural structure canopies a transparent photograph of the same sort of elementary shelter in an urban space, in model-size proportions. The abstract, hut-like, steel structure forms the framework for a direct reference to its real origins. In addition, this is also the first showing of Hornig?s series of photographs on paper of façades, shop windows, and interiors. These studies might also be models for sculptures and photographic works, but their almost print-like quality allows them to stand on their own.
Sabine Hornig (born in 1964 in Pforzheim) lives and works in Berlin. In 1987 she began studying visual arts and sculpture under David Evison and Isa Genzken at the HdK Berlin (now the Berlin University of the Arts). She received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant in 1998, and the PS1 grant in New York in 1999/2000; in 2009 she was the recipient of the Goethe Institutes Villa Aurora grant in Los Angeles.
Solo shows (selected):
Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 1993; MOMA, New York, 2003; Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon 2005; Berlinische
Galerie, Berlin, 2006; Pinakothek der Moderne and Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 2011/12.
Still Life at Window
2 December, 2011 - 29 February, 2012
Parallel to her comprehensive exhibition, Durchs Fenster /Through the Window, at the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Alte Pinakothek, we are pleased to feature the second solo show by Sabine Hornig, from December 2 through February 18, 2012. The Berlin artist dissolves the boundaries separating photography, sculpture, and installation, allowing the everyday and the coincidental to interplay in her visual and spatial analogies.
Her first show at the gallery in 2005 featured a large slide of a curtained shop window, set into a wall separating two rooms of the gallery. Initially perceived as a mural, the transparency and change of perspective became apparent to viewers upon closer inspection. Hornig has been exploring this layering of abstract visual space and real space since 2001. Her process results in a multi-level visual construct consisting of transparency and reflection, uniting several views of a spatial situation on a two-dimensional level. With a background in sculpture, architectural and sculptural aspects are important to the artist. By construing the window pictures as objects and integrating them as photographic elements into her sculptures, Hornig creates hybrid forms that can be regarded as photo-sculptures. She emulates architectural details in sculpture and combines them with photographs to create new kinds of objects, leading to a new perspective of the interplay between objects and their materiality.
Another example is the sculpture Stilleben am Fenster / Still Life at Window, 2010: a semi-circular balcony wall is joined to two wooden window frames set at right angles to each other, which can be interpreted as picture frames. They are covered with transparent fabric printed with photographs of shop windows seen from the outside. Hornig creates a new space within the exhibition space, whose transparency simulates openness, yet the viewer is denied entry to it. The situation is similar in the small sculpture Hütte III / Hut III, 2009: a house of cards made of steel. This fragile looking architectural structure canopies a transparent photograph of the same sort of elementary shelter in an urban space, in model-size proportions. The abstract, hut-like, steel structure forms the framework for a direct reference to its real origins. In addition, this is also the first showing of Hornig?s series of photographs on paper of façades, shop windows, and interiors. These studies might also be models for sculptures and photographic works, but their almost print-like quality allows them to stand on their own.
Sabine Hornig (born in 1964 in Pforzheim) lives and works in Berlin. In 1987 she began studying visual arts and sculpture under David Evison and Isa Genzken at the HdK Berlin (now the Berlin University of the Arts). She received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant in 1998, and the PS1 grant in New York in 1999/2000; in 2009 she was the recipient of the Goethe Institutes Villa Aurora grant in Los Angeles.
Solo shows (selected):
Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 1993; MOMA, New York, 2003; Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon 2005; Berlinische
Galerie, Berlin, 2006; Pinakothek der Moderne and Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 2011/12.