Channa Horwitz: The Language Series

The Language Series was created one year after I left school in 1964. I was in the process of reducing my choices, because I wanted my work to be simpler and I was searching for an essence. 

I started by reducing my subject to a square. I thought of the square as all objects. I also used a circle. I thought of the circle as the circumference of all objects. If I stood up, the circle around me would be bigger than if I crouched down.

 I created eight rectangular shapes. I numbered the shapes from one to eight. I drew rectangular boxes for a series of thumbnail sketches. I played with three of the eight shapes sequentially in each of the sketches.

In the first drawing I played with shapes numbered 1 - 2 - 3. In the second drawing I played with shapes numbered 1 - 2 - 4, all the way to 1 - 2 - 8. Next I drew the sequence as 1 - 3 - 4, all the way to 1 - 3 - 8.

I played with all of the possible permutations of the eight numbers, ending with 1 - 7 - 8.

1 - 2 - 3          1 - 2 - 4          1 - 2 - 5          1 - 2 - 6          1 - 2 - 7          1 - 2 - 8    

1 - 3 - 4          1 - 3 - 5          1 - 3 - 6          1 - 3 - 7          1 - 3 - 8

1 - 4 - 5          1 - 4 - 6          1 - 4 - 7          1 - 4 - 8 

1 - 5 - 6          1 - 5 - 7          1 - 5 - 8

1 - 6 - 7          1 - 6 - 8

1 - 7 - 8

François Ghebaly is proud to present an exhibition of Channa Horwitz’s drawings and paintings from The Language Series, a vital body of work that spanned the entirety of her long and rigorous career. The exhibition will feature works first conceptualized in 1964 and finally completed between 2003 and 2011. It will be accompanied by a major new wall painting based on a 2005 painting and a related mural proposal from 2011. 

Channa Horwitz (1932-2013) was born in Los Angeles, where she lived and worked. In the final years of her life, her extensive practice started gaining long overdue recognition for its contributions to the development of conceptual art and process-based abstraction, with showings at the 55th Venice Biennale and the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship Grant in 2013. In the years that followed, her works were included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as well as major group exhibitions at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horwitz’s work is held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Inhotim Museum, Brumadinho, Brazil; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among numerous others. 

Recently, Horwitz’s work was presented in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain, and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, as well as the group exhibition Bauhaus 100 at Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany. A forthcoming monographic publication will be published by Circle Books in the spring of 2022.