SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Museum of Craft and Design presents Robyn Horn: Material Illusions. This exhibition is the West Coast debut of American artist Robyn Horn’s newest large-scale sculptures and paintings. Horn’s work mirrors aspects of natural environments while exploring the correlations between materiality and ideas that nature embodies.
Showcasing a large array of Horn’s latest work, much of which was created during the 2020 quarantine period, Material Illusions explores Horn’s interest in time, and more specifically how the passage of time relates to material, decay, and entropy. Horn’s practice has always examined the effect of time on materials; utilizing wood necessitates a strong embrace of time, as a tree’s age can change how effectively it can be carved and manipulated. For an artist who has been honing their craft with wood for over 35 years, time is measured not only in the hours, months, and sometimes years spent on a specific piece, but also in natural time–a slower process–in constructing their material.
Although Horn had been planning and creating work for Material Illusions for several years, the 2020 quarantine offered an unexpected period to focus on her practice. Realizing she was placed in an at-risk category, in part due to her age, the artist began considering time in a new way. Early on in her practice, Horn worked on the lathe, making wood bowls and vases which eventually evolved into carving wood sculptures. As her practice expanded, so too did the size of her pieces and the tools needed to create them, eventually utilizing a chainsaw to carve her raw materials. Material Illusions will showcase 11 sculptures, some standing as tall as 6 feet.
Horn has always worked in series, making sculptures that share qualities of asymmetry, geometry, volume, lack of balance, contrast, and heavy textural qualities. Recently she has moved into painting and explored similar qualities in two dimensions. While the paintings employ an additive process (adding layers of paint) rather than the subtractive technique used in her sculptures, they consider similar themes found in her woodwork and rely on Horn’s unique exploration of surfaces. This demonstration of Horn’s technique can be seen in pieces such as Our Perception of Time (2020), which, with its overlays of rust, suggests a metaphor for natural processes and takes on a larger-than-life quality as it looms 24 feet wide by 5 feet 3 inches tall.
MCD’s Executive Director, JoAnn Edwards notes, “It is an honor to premier Horn’s bold and powerful work on the West Coast. Her irresistible kinship for material and process through chain-saw carving, scraping, and cutting, reveals secret crannies and the underbelly of her raw materials, as if turning the work inside out. Whether intimate or massive-scale, Horn’s approach to creating balance, scale, and spatial connections, has earned her a place in the pantheon of American art.”
Robyn Horn: Material Illusions will be on view at the Museum of Craft and Design June 25–October 30, 2022. A publication accompanying the exhibition, with essays by Janet Koplos and Lawrence Rinder, will be available online and in the Museum Store.
Robyn Horn: Material Illusions is generously supported by Fleur Bresler, the Alice L. Walton Foundation, The Feltus Family, Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Anita and Ronald Wornick, Eleanor and Bruce Heister, Dana Martin Davis, Alyce and Steve Kaplan, Barbara Laughlin, Hal Nelson and Bernard Jazzar, Jamienne Studley and Gary Smith, and Barbara Waldman. Additional support is provided by Center for the Craft, Polly Allen, Lorene E. Lassiter and Gary P. Ferraro, Marion Fulk, Dr. Todd Herman and Mr. Harry Gerard, Mary Ellen Irons and Scott Bowen, Joseph Lampo and Dr. Terry Jefferson, Brad and Bobby Cushman, John E. Brown, Judith Chernoff, M.D. and Jeffrey Bernstein, M.D., JoAnn and Ken Edwards, Virginia McGehee Friend, Mia Hall and David Clemons, Tina and Albert LeCoff, and Rob Pulleyn. In-kind support is provided by Studio Hinrichs and Mark Richard Leach.
