Counting in Eight, Moving by Colour

When the Californian artist Channa Horwitz passed away in 2013 at the age of 81, she had just begun her artistic career. She had worked in complete seclusion for years before a presentation of her works at the exhibition MADE IN L.A. one year before her death, was received by both the press and public with overwhelming enthusiasm. Unfortunately, she did not live to see the international attention her works generated at the last Venice Biennale. Horwitz’s works are characterised by the search for a simple and yet universal system to capture movements in time. Using a system of notation based on the number 8, she constantly produced new variations of complex systems which resemble a kind of musical score. These scores allow movements to be visualised in relation to time and space by means of graphic scales and colour schemes. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art presented the first extensive solo exhibition of Horwitz’s works, many of which have never been shown before, and tied them to current discourse. Some of the central works were reconstructed based on the artist’s own future plans, and in some cases, even created for the first time.

Artistic director: Ellen Blumenstein