Andrea Hornick

Andrea Hornick is an artist working in painting, drawing, text, text-based audio works, and performance, all generated with syncretic ritual practices. 

Her Animal History Portraits project consists of paintings and works on paper, both paired with micro fictions, listened to or read.

The paintings are meticulous copies of Renaissance - Early Modern portraits of women, altered. Each figure merges with an animal interlocutor and its environment, restoring aspects to the woman that have been idealized out of her likeness. The transformation empowers each figure’s presence as subject rather than object. A ritual practice that Hornick grew up learning is employed in pairing animals/environments with sitters.

Hornick researches the materials and processes of the master painter, including the historical context for the portrait commission – a man paying for a portrait of a woman, commissioned for propriety. Each work takes months to paint. Conservation research helps the artist approximate the making and application of traditional gesso, varnish recipes, pigments and oil mediums. Rendered in the sitter’s palette, the animals/environments sit in a liminal space, and express what the woman, and the painter omitted for the sake of idealization. Beyond restoration of self, in recent work, the women merge with the non-human elements to expand their identities.

Accompanying sound works and/or text panels for each work or grouping contain narratives that conflate the historical narrative with the intuitive narrative. The subjectivity of the intuitive narrative points to the subjectivity of accepted histories. Or, intuitively gathered facts taunt the perceived authority of the historical narrative. Creative projection in viewing is encouraged.

As critic Gretchen Bakke notes, introducing a conversation between Hornick and the anthropologist Timothy Ingold in Designs for the Anthropocene, featured in Public Books: “Hornick’s women and animals are so tightly bound that, sometimes, the creature seems like clothing to the woman, other times, the woman more like setting (than person) to the animal…Hornick’s paintings are gorgeous and silly…a kind of force or perhaps a capacious gust of capacities.”

“Post-Studies,” works on paper take two forms: hand-painted cyanotypes and loose chalk pastel, graphite and gouache works on paper inspired by old masters’ studies. They provide an end ritual; a loose, quick outlet of the careful technique that has been internalized by the artist during each boot-camp with an old master, which is her painting process.

Text-based sound installation and performance elaborate upon the narratives. Read-aloud epic poems belie the artist’s generative practice which upend the perception of authorship and question the cannon. They are listened to in installations of her works. Or, they are heard in existing museum collections, lending focus, especially in the case of dense installations, as in her 2017 Barnes Foundation exhibition, Unbounded Histories, the first contemporary piece to be included in the Barnes Foundation’s Collection Galleries.

Abstract landscapes engage connection to land through intuition. Her current abstract body of work envisions a structure of light regenerating contemporary and near-future ruin sites. This body of work was first generated during visions encountered over ten years at temple ruin sites in western Sicily, and expanded during a two year immersion in Australia’s Sydney coast.

Hornick shares the intuitive rituals that generate her work in performance pieces at the galleries and museums where she exhibits. Starting in September 2025 she will be doing a collaboration with Segesta - a pre-Greek Temple ruin in Sicily, offering a residency and performances for the local public.

Andrea Hornick (b. 1970) holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also studied at the New York Studio School. Unbounded Histories, 2017, was a sound project at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia - the first contemporary work in their Collection Galleries. Since 2017, she has been represented by Sears Peyton Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. She has had one person exhibitions at David Krut Projects, NY; Savery Gallery, Philadelphia; and Jen Bekman, NY. A discussion between Hornick and the anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has just appeared on Public Books. Other articles, interviews, and reviews have been in Hyperallergic, Artsy, LA Times, NPR, Philadelphia Enquirer, and elsewhere. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 – 2021, and has taught at Barnard College, Oberlin College, Auckland University (NZ), and as a Museum Teacher at The Jewish Museum, NY, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Morgan Library, and the American Museum of Natural History. Hornick lives and works in Amsterdam, NL and New York.