Stairmaster Suite

What you are looking at

The photograph shows a gallery wall at the Museum of Modern Art hung with a single row of ten small, identically framed sheets. Each is a horizontal strip of paper bearing a grey band of marks along its lower half, a profile of narrow vertical bars that rises and falls like a skyline or a bar chart. From left to right along the wall the profiles grow taller and denser, so the row reads as a sequence rather than ten separate pictures.

MoMA catalogues the work as two sets of five sheets from Jonathan Horowitz's Stairmaster Suite, made in 1996 in ink on printed paper. Each sheet measures 12.1 by 24.8 centimeters. The individual titles give a set number, a sheet number and a date, for example Set 4, #4 (7-18-96) through Set 4, #28 (9-3-96), and Set 6, #6 (7-20-96) through Set 6, #30 (9-6-96). The dates run from mid-July to early September 1996.

Reading the work

The title points to the StairMaster, the stair-climbing gym machine, and the dated numbering makes the sheets look like a training diary: a record of repeated sessions over one summer. The steady progression across each set suggests accumulation or effort over time. Horowitz has not published a detailed account of the series that we could verify, so how the printed paper and the ink marks relate to actual workouts should be treated as an open question rather than a fact.

What is clear is how the suite fits his wider practice. Horowitz, born in 1966 and based in New York, is known for work that borrows from mass culture, television, politics and everyday routine, often with deadpan humor. Turning something as ordinary as gym exercise into a disciplined, serial drawing project is in keeping with that approach. Elsewhere in the catalogue see his Left-Over Paint Abstraction, Black Dot Project and Hillary Clinton is a Person Too.

Where to see it

Both sets entered MoMA's Department of Drawings and Prints in 2005 as part of The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. Works on paper are shown in rotation, so check the museum's online collection to see whether the suite is currently on view. More on the artist: Jonathan Horowitz.