Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College is pleased to present LINEAGES, a solo exhibition by Andrea Hornick. The show will be up from March 23rd through April 23rd, and we will host an opening reception on March 23rd from 5 – 6:30pm.
Andrea Hornick is an artist working in painting, sound, and text, generated with syncretic ritual practices. Lineages is an exhibition of works on paper side by side with text panels. Each work on paper is a post-study in graphite, chalk pastel, watercolor, and gouache, of a portrait from her Animal History Portraits body of work. Each of the portraits is the artist’s copy of an old masters’ portrait of a woman with an imagined animal inserted. Hornick weaves the images together so that the animal transforms the sitter, changing the atmosphere and empowering her presence as a subject rather than an object.
For the oils which inspire the works in Lineages, Hornick researches the materials and processes of the master painter, including the historical context for the portrait commission – a man paying for a portrait of a woman, to display prestige. Each work takes months to paint. The artist works with conservators to perfect the making and application of traditional gesso and varnish recipes, pigments, and oil mediums. Rendered in the sitter’s palette, the animals sit in a liminal space, and express what the woman and the painter omitted.
These post-studies are a free, intuitive response to the meticulous replication of the historical portrait and its animal. For the works on paper, Hornick works directly from her own finished portraits. In so doing, she reaps the benefit of the connections she’s made while working between the color palettes, and spatial and energetic relationships which transform the sitter/animal.
Narratives on text panel accompany each work, equal in size, with equal valence. The narratives are written from the point of view of the animal's first encounter with the woman sitter. They conflate the historical narrative with that generated from Hornick’s ritual practice, upending accepted canonical authority. “Lineages,” refers to the relationships between the historical sitter, her family context, and the animal that affects transformation, rippling out to the present. It also refers to the literal lines that redraw these relationships, the effect of Hornick’s contemporary portraits.
As critic Gretchen Bakke notes, introducing a conversation between Hornick and the anthropologist Timothy Ingold in Designs for the Anthropocene, featured in Public Books: “Hornick’s women and animals are so tightly bound that, sometimes, the creature seems like clothing to the woman, other times, the woman more like setting (than person) to the animal…Hornick’s paintings are gorgeous and silly…a kind of force or perhaps a capacious gust of capacities.”
The catalogue from Hornick’s recent exhibition, Andrea Hornick: New Work 1435 – 1783 which ran from November 2022 through January 2023, will be on view at Handwerker Gallery during the run of Lineages.
Andrea Hornick (b. 1970) holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also studied at the New York Studio School. Unbounded Histories, 2017, was a sound project at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia - the first contemporary work in their Collection Galleries. She is currently represented by Sears Peyton Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. She has also had one person exhibitions at David Krut Projects, NY; Savery Gallery, Philadelphia; and Jen Bekman, NY. A discussion between Hornick and the anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has just appeared on Public Books. Other articles, interviews, and reviews have been in Hyperallergic, Artsy, LA Times, NPR, Philadelphia Enquirer, and elsewhere. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 – 2021, and has taught at Barnard College, Oberlin College, Auckland University (NZ), and as a Museum Teacher at The Jewish Museum, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Morgan Library, and the American Museum of Natural History. Hornick lives in Berlin and New York.
