Los Angeles – Depart Foundation is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles based artist Marc Horowitz. Curated by Nicola Ricciardi, Interior, Day (A Door Opens), on view October 8 – January 30, 2016, will feature new paintings and sculpture. With a prescient instinct for the untapped cultural potential of populist mediums, notably Internet culture, commercial advertising and the entertainment industry, Horowitz looks to establish a social connection and reciprocity between viewer and artist.
In this new body of work, Horowitz stages encounters between the high and low, and the old and new, conflating art historical references and typologies in a mash-up of thrift store chintz and idiosyncratic commentary. Often funny, irreverently bawdy and even scatological, Horowitz’s sculptures start with formal references to Classical statuary which are then playfully corrupted with the inclusion of junky every day objects; everything from plastic cups to ceramic budgies and clown figurines.
Horowitz’s paintings are executed on canvas with a combination of oil, charcoal, pastel and acrylic spray paint. Combining abstract expressionist markmaking, vibrant color, and cartoonish shorthand, his works feel haphazard and precise, combining the best aspects of spontaneous notation and deliberate composition. Concerned with conjuring an experiential context beyond the immediate frame of the art object, his aesthetic never veers too far away from a cinematic proposition. The title Interior, Day (A Door Opens) conjures a mise en scène, encouraging the viewer to insert themselves into the narratives offered by this irreverent storyteller. The titles of the artworks themselves are drawn from screenplays for The Matrix and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and are intended to reinforce the willfully awkward and wonderfully playful displacements that Horowitz encourages through his works.
Horowitz has lived by popular vote–crowdsourcing an entire month of his life–traveled the country dining with strangers, taken a virtual cross-country road trip using Google maps, handed out blank sheets of paper as free ideas, and run errands in San Francisco on a mule – all in service of his experimental social practice. Using social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter, his video projects, webisodes and social interventions have gone viral, making him an Internet celebrity. Horowitz stages the situational, experimenting with the relegation of control and allowing his projects to evolve on their own terms in the social arena. Constantly interested in the dissimulating mechanisms of commercial consumerism and the unabated acceleration of virtual culture, he offers us clever one-liners that invariably evolve into deeper explorations of consumption, ideology and culture.
An artist book entitled Phillips Auction Catalog published by NERO will be released in conjunction with the exhibition.
ABOUT MARC HOROWITZ
Marc Horowitz (b. 1976) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, painting, performance, video, sculpture and social practice. Horowitz holds a master’s degree in art from the University of Southern California, and bachelor’s degrees in art and marketing from San Francisco Art Institute, and Indiana University Kelley School of Business. In a practice that combines traditional drawing, commercial photography, and new media, Horowitz turns American culture on its head to explore the idiosyncrasies of entertainment, class, commerce, failure, success, and personal meaning. Using visual puns, large-scale participatory projects, and viral social pranks, Horowitz creates environments of high energy that lift the most mundane to the status of grand event in complex interplays between subject, viewer, and participant.
Horowitz has exhibited both nationally and internationally; notable solo exhibitions include: Moving, Aran Cravey, Los Angeles (2013), The Advice of Strangers, funded by Creative Time, curated by Nato Thompson, web-based (2011), The Me & You Show, The Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2007), The Center for Improved Living, Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, CH (2007), More Better, AMT Gallery, Lake Como IT (2007), TCFIL, Galerie Nuke, Paris FR (2007). His work has been featured extensively on local and national television including ABC News, NPR Weekend Edition, CBS Inside Edition CBS, CNN American Morning, and on NBC’s The Today Show. He has taught at the University of Southern California and lectured at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California Institute of the Arts, Stanford University, and Yale University. Horowitz teaches a course in new media art at Otis College with his partner, Petra Cortright.
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