Rebecca Horn / Tree of Winter Dew Drops / 2007 / pencil, colored pen, acrylic, and India ink on paper / paper: 71 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches (182 x 150 cm) framed: 81 1/2 x 68 3/4 inches / Sean Kelly Gallery

The drawings and paintings are light and airy. The sculptures and installation pieces brought a smile to my face. Like a child encountering and fascinated by the surrounding world populated with birds, butterflies, and a myriad of other flying creatures.

Rebecca Horn’s exhibition will be comprised of both new large-scale paintings on paper and a group of signature sculptures. These important new paintings, the scale of which are determined by the extent of the artist’s physical reach, evoke personal, metaphorical, and metaphysical influences orchestrated through dynamic gesture. The new paintings on paper clearly relate to Horn’s seminal early performance pieces in which she sculpturally extended the body into space. In an accompanying catalog essay Doris von Drathen explains: “Against this backdrop, the paintings on paper assembled here under the title Cosmic Maps are more that just ‘recent works.’ As a group, these paintings from the last few years plot oscillations, for the first time opening out a pictorial space that hazards to sever all connection to topographical space ….”

Rebecca Horn, (born in Germany, 1944), is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Historically, her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including film, performance, installation, photography and sculpture, whilst addressing themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The employment of such wide ranging interests as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, the mechanical and the sensual, has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last three decades and has resulted in one of the most distinguished and individual oeuvres in recent memory. Horn has participated in the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions, she has had a retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and she is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions.

Rebecca Horn, Cosmic Maps, at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th Street through June 14th

It’s been a busy week between work, painting, and hanging a group show last Sunday, but I was able to get to a bunch of shows that I will try to write about this weekend. Stay tuned….

Chihung Yang @ ChinaSquare
Tom Leaver @ McKenzie Fine Art
Tony Magar @ Mike Weiss Gallery
Andre Butzer and Walter Robinson @ Metro Pictures
Miriam Schapiro @ Flomenhaft
Subhankar Banerjee @ Sundaram Tagore
Andre Millner @ Tria Gallery
Monica Mary @ Explorations
Deborah Ragasto & Michael Souter @ Allen Gallery
Tening Rigdol & Palden Weinreb @ Dinter Fine Art
Rudol De Crignis @ Peter Blum Chelsea
Los Carpinteros @ Sean Kelly
100 Stories @ Hosfelt Gallery
Peter Hujar @ Matthew Marks
Martians & Homeland Insecurity @ Esso Gallery
ASS•AS•SIN: hashish anyone @ Lombard-Freid Projects
New Ukrainian Painting @ White Box