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ROBYN HORN: MATERIAL ILLUSIONS

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Wood block sculpture with middle cut out slightly and grain lines coming from the middle
Wood block sculpture with middle cut out slightly and grain lines coming from the middle

ROBYN HORN: MATERIAL ILLUSIONS

June 25 – October 30, 2022

Co-Curators: 
Ariel Zaccheo
JoAnn Edwards

 

A publication accompanying the exhibition 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.,  Harriet and Warren Stephens, 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 Craft, Polly Allen, Lorne 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, Dr. Judith Chernoff and Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein, JoAnn and Ken Edwards, Virginia McGehee Friend, Mia Hall and David Clemons, Tina and Albert LeCoff, and Rob Pulleyn.

In-kind support is generously provided by Studio Hinrichs and Mark Richard Leach.

 

The Museum of Craft and Design’s exhibitions and programs are generously supported by Anonymous and Grants for the Arts. Additional support provided by Hunter Douglas and Dorothy Saxe.

Artist Robyn Horn has been working with wood for over 35 years. Robyn Horn: Material Illusions will showcase Horn’s latest work, much of which was created during the 2020 Covid-19 quarantine period. The exhibition will be the first museum exhibition to present Horn’s recent sculptures and paintings on the West Coast.

In 1984, Horn began working on the lathe, making wood bowls and vases which eventually evolved into carving wood sculpture. 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. Horn has always worked in series, making sculptures that contain qualities of asymmetry, geometry, volume, lack of balance, and contrast with heavily textured surfaces. In 2005, she ventured into painting and explored similar qualities in two dimensions.

Wood as a medium and material for art-making is inherently entwined with time. For stable, seasoned wood to become mature enough to work, decades and sometimes centuries may pass. 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.

Robyn Horn explores this geologic time, reproducing the splendor of natural rock formations in carved wood sculptures. Her entropic pieces throw the natural order into a state of near-chaos; wood appears as if slipping from stacks–perilously teetering on thin bases. Under Horn’s hand, a material stable and sturdy enough to use in construction becomes elegantly precarious.

Mirroring aspects of natural environments, including Blackchurch Rock, a rock formation in the United Kingdom which served as the inspiration for her sculpture Continuous Motion (2020),  this initial showing will explore correlations between the materiality and ideas that nature embodies.

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 understanding of geometry and exploration of surfaces. Horn builds up the surfaces of the canvases with layers of paint, before carving into them or embedding found metal, mirroring the techniques of her richly textured sculpture.

 

Above Image: Robyn Horn, Diagonal Passageway, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

Robyn Horn was born in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and graduated from Northside High School. With both her mother and her sister as painters, her interest in the arts was encouraged and she went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Art from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Following college, she worked in the typesetting field in Little Rock, before becoming the chief photographer for Arkansas Parks and Tourism. After trying her hand at stained glass, she found wood.

In 1984, she began working on the lathe making wood bowls and vases which eventually evolved into carving wood sculpture. Over the past 30 years, she has developed an aesthetic through studying the work of sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and David Nash, as well as painters’ work such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, along with Picasso and Braque’s Cubism. Horn has always worked in series, making sculptures that contain qualities of asymmetry, geometry, volume, lack of balance, and contrast with heavily textured surfaces. In 2005, she ventured into painting and explored similar qualities in two dimensions.

Robyn Horn’s work has been collected and exhibited by museums and galleries throughout the nation and internationally.

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