Andrea Hornick

Hornick is an artist working in painting, drawing, sound, text, and performance generated with syncretic ritual practices. 

Her Animal History Portraits body of work consists of portraits that are each a 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.

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. Text panels or accompanying sound works for each painting contain narratives from the point of view of the animal's first encounter with the woman sitter.

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.”

“Post-Studies,” are loose chalk pastel, graphite and gouache works on paper that are inspired by old masters’ studies. They provide an end ritual; a loose, quick outlet of the tight technique learned during each several-months long painting process.

Text-based sound installation and performance elaborate upon the conflated historical and transformed narratives. The works are read epic poems that conflate narratives from art history and shamanic ritual to upend the perception of authorship and question the cannon. They are listened to in installations of her work to expand and illuminate the narratives generated in her painting process. Or, in existing museum collections, as in her 2017 Barnes Foundation exhibition, Unbounded Histories, the first contemporary piece to be included in the Barnes Foundation’s Collection Galleries.

Abstract landscapes engage connection to land through intuition. Her current abstract body of work envisions a structure of light regenerating contemporary and near-future ruin sites.

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 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.