Jonathan Horowitz

Jonathan Horowitz is a New York-based artist, born in 1966, whose work borrows the look of mass culture, from greeting-card figurines and movie trailers to flags and charity boxes, to make pointed and often funny statements about American political life. He works across video, sculpture, painting, sound installation, photography and projects that invite the public to take part. Critics have generally described the work as political without being propaganda: it raises questions about liberal belief, shopping, war and celebrity rather than telling viewers what to think.

Life in brief

Horowitz grew up in New York and studied philosophy at Wesleyan University, graduating in 1987. He emerged in the 1990s making videos and installations from found footage of film and television. He showed for many years with Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and with Sadie Coles HQ in London, and is now represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. His solo exhibitions include Go Vegan! at Greene Naftali (2002), The New Communism (2005) and Obama '08 (2008) at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and Apocalypto Now at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2009). In 2009 P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York staged his retrospective, And/Or.

Style and themes

Horowitz's method is appropriation with a twist. He takes a familiar form and changes one thing: the scale, the context or the caption. Three Rainbow American Flags for Jasper in the Style of the Artist's Boyfriend (2005) reworks Jasper Johns's celebrated flag paintings in rainbow colors and glitter. Go Vegan! filled a gallery with images of vegetarian celebrities. Many projects take the form of a public service, a shop or a poll, so that the exhibition becomes a small model of civic life. The tone is deadpan, and the humor carries real discomfort.

Key works in the catalogue

Hillary Clinton Is a Person Too (2008) is a six-foot bonded-bronze enlargement of a 1970s-style novelty figurine: a wide-eyed girl with a mug, a boy reaching over her head, and the title in raised letters on the base. Made during the bitter 2008 Democratic primary and first shown in Obama '08, it was a centerpiece again in 2016, in the survey Occupy Greenwich at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The Black Dot Project refers to Horowitz's ongoing Dots, his best-known participatory work. Volunteers are each asked to paint a solid black dot freehand in the center of a square white canvas, without rulers or compasses. The first, 402 Dots, Line, and the One Note Samba (2014), was made from 402 canvases each painted by a different person. Versions followed at Frieze New York in 2015, where hundreds of visitors were paid to paint dots, and 160 Dots at the Swiss Institute in 2016, where participants voted on nonprofit organizations to receive part of the proceeds. Every dot is slightly wrong, and the grid of near-identical failures becomes a portrait of a crowd. Horowitz has compared the dot to the atomic unit of the printed comic-book image.

The Donation Cubes are transparent collection boxes of the kind found in museum lobbies, each dedicated to a different organization and placed side by side, so that visitors' choices of where to put money become visible. They were reinstalled in Occupy Greenwich in 2016 alongside his Free Store, a gallery stocked with goods given away for nothing.

Left-Over Paint Abstraction belongs to a series of panels made from paint remaining after other works were finished. Shown as Leftover Paint Abstractions at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels in 2018, the series turns studio waste into gestural abstract painting, a sly comment on the heroic myths attached to abstraction.

Stairmaster Suite is an early work on paper of 1996: sets of ink drawings on printed paper. The Museum of Modern Art in New York owns Stairmaster Suite: Set 4, a group of five sheets given by the Judith Rothschild Foundation, and showed another set in its 2007 exhibition Lines, Grids, Stains, Words.

Talking Without Thinking was shown with The Universal Calendar at Van Laere Contemporary Art in Antwerp in 2000. The title belongs to a portrait of George W. Bush imagined as he was around 1980, a mocking response to the man then running for president.

We Fight to Build a Free World (2020) was an exhibition Horowitz curated at the Jewish Museum in New York. It brought together work by more than seventy artists, historical and contemporary, to examine how artists have responded to authoritarianism, xenophobia and bigotry, setting today's politics against earlier histories of oppression.

Your Land/My Land

In the election year of 2012 Horowitz staged Your Land/My Land: Election '12 in seven American museums at once, from the New Museum in New York to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Each installation divided the room into red and blue halves and showed live election coverage, turning the gallery into a place to watch, argue and vote.

Where to see his work

Horowitz's work is in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and S.M.A.K. in Ghent, and is shown regularly by Xavier Hufkens and Sadie Coles HQ. For other modern artists who work with pop imagery, see Tony Rubino.