Left-Over Paint Abstraction

Left-Over Paint Abstraction is the name of an ongoing series of paintings by Jonathan Horowitz, a New York artist born in 1966 who is best known for work that uses pop culture, politics and mass media. The series has a simple rule: the panels are made with paint left over from other works in the studio, so their colors are not chosen in advance but inherited from whatever Horowitz has been making. The example shown here is one of many; we have not confirmed its individual date or size.

What you are looking at

A tall, upright panel is covered from top to bottom in vertical drips. Hundreds of runs of paint, in turquoise, sky blue, lemon yellow, pink, red, lilac, gray, white and black, fall in parallel lines down the surface, some thin as threads, others swelling into rounded blobs where the paint pooled and slowed.

The densest color is in the center. Toward the left and right edges, the drips thin out over a glossy black ground, which also shows through in small gaps throughout. A few red and white lines run almost the full height of the panel; elsewhere the drips stop short and end in round beads. Near the top, the colors are thickest, as if the paint was loaded along the upper edge and allowed to run down under gravity.

The surface is shiny, more like enamel or household paint than artist's oil, and the edges of the panel are clean.

How it was made

The process is close to that of earlier drip and pour painters, from Jackson Pollock's poured canvases to the color stains of Morris Louis, but with a deliberately unheroic motive. Rather than expressing an inner state, the paintings use up material that would otherwise be thrown away. The artist does not compose so much as set up conditions: a panel, a ground color and a supply of leftover paint, then gravity.

How to read it

Horowitz's work often questions the myths of art making, including the idea of the inspired abstract painter. The series title is matter-of-fact, almost a production note, and the paintings can be read as a gentle joke on gestural abstraction: they look expressive, but the colors are accidents of studio housekeeping. At the same time, they are records of the studio itself, a by-product of everything else made there.

Where to see it

Works from the series have been shown in Horowitz's exhibitions with his galleries. For his other works in our catalogue, see Black Dot Project, Donation Cubes and Stairmaster Suite, and the Jonathan Horowitz page.