Jonathan Horowitz is known for his post-pop art critique of consumer society and his politically charged installations. He graduated in philosophy and film in 1987, the year that Andy Warhol died. In much of his art, Horowitz appropriates the visual language of pop art as it was aesthetically canonised by Warhol. But then underpinned with the critical rigour typical of conceptual art. In terms of medium, Horowitz has evolved from videos, by way of installations, to painting.
From shortly after graduating until well into the 1990s, Horowitz worked as a video editor. He analysed this medium in his first artworks. After several experiments with video, the artist started to critically examine the conventions of television, domestic entertainment and popular culture. His focus shifted to social criticism. He touches on almost every topical theme connected to American culture, from the social to the political: war, consumerism, race, sexuality, religion, the two-party political system and the impact of mass media and celebrities on the personal sphere.
In 2000, the artist presented ‘The Jonathan Horowitz Show’. He played excerpts of films and TV programmes across seven screens, which he interrupted with sober, autobiographical intertitles such as “I think I have AIDS (1988-1993)”. Horowitz brings opposites together in order to clarify them or create perspective. For example, with the red of Coca Cola and the blue of Pepsi, he alludes to America’s two-party political system and suggests that freedom of choice is an illusion. In President Barack Obama’s re-election year, 2012, Horowitz presented the installation entitled ‘Your Land/My Land: Election ‘12’’ in seven American museums simultaneously. The work invited the public to discuss politics and actually vote.
In recent series of paintings, Horowitz has evidently built on the work of pop art artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and on Roy Lichtenstein’s famous dots. In 2015, at the Frieze art fair in New York, the artist asked 700 VIP guests to paint a black circle freehand on a square canvas in exchange for a $20 cheque. Unlike mechanical reproduction techniques, the paintings contained unique imperfections and were thus important. Later, he combined the canvases into ‘700 Dots’, seven minimalist ensembles of 100 images each, which he offered for sale as his work.
