Channa Horwitz

The work Flowings I (Crescendo) (1987) by the U.S. American artist Channa Horwitz is part of the Schering Stiftung Collection. It is based on a rigorous system called “Sonakinatography,” which the artist developed in 1968 as part of a project for the exhibition Art and Technology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in which each line has a function. The color, direction, and length of each line stands for certain sounds, movements, words, and visual stimuli. The concept ultimately became the fundamental composition system for Horwitz’s drawing practice.

Horwitz worked with a predefined color palette comprising eight colors from dark green, dark blue, violet, pink, red, orange to yellow and light green. Working on graph paper, she was able to evenly vary and modify the lines, squares, and diamonds she put on paper. This way, she generated complex movement patterns that can also be viewed as notation systems condensing time, rhythm, and movement.

Her engagement with movement effects and serial principles is evocative of Op Art aesthetics, and her works show a kinship with those of Minimal Art artists such as Sol LeWitt, with whom she was in close contact all her life. Within her self-imposed color and drawing principle, Horwitz recognized the potential for a multitude of possible variations. By allowing technical imperfections, she distanced her works from an ostensibly exact and error-free computer-generated art. It was only in the 2000s that her work gained wider recognition in Europe, with retrospectives to her work being held in Germany (2015) and Spain (2018).