REBECCA WATSON HORN

Rebecca Watson Horn’s paintings are made with oil on burlap over canvas, a layering of materials that allows for a surface teeming with accidents, texture and tactile appeals to the senses. Rendered in a palette of deep reds, mossy greens, gold-tinged yellows, pale greenish grays and pinks, elongated shapes stretch and color fields expand along the warp and weft of fabric, literally enmeshed in the picture plane. Each image is formed through the progressive graphic distortion of phrases and words, converted from signifiers or sentences into abstract scriptural glyphs. The artist often refers to sigils as an analogue to this process, symbols used in enchantments, representing the signature of a thought or the materialization of an intention or desire. The original verbal aspect of the spell in question is eventually blurred beyond recognition, and its content gives way to an enigmatic visual configuration.The pictorial tampering with vestiges of language allows meaning to gather and dissipate, for our attention to float or focus on specific passages, working as a diagramming of sensory experience, modulating the ascending motions of thought and the anchoring gravity of materiality.

Born in Boston and based in New York, Rebecca Watson Horn (b. 1981) works primarily with painting and textiles, developing compositions that explore the relationship between language, abstraction, and materiality. Using oil paint on burlap over canvas, she builds textured surfaces in which words and phrases are gradually transformed into gestural forms and cryptic marks, dissolving legibility into image. Her works are characterized by layered color fields, amorphous shapes, and an emphasis on the physical qualities of fabric and paint, creating compositions that shift between writing and painting, structure and atmosphere. Working through repetition, distortion, and accumulation, Horn approaches language as both a visual and symbolic system, treating text less as communication than as a field of rhythm, memory, and sensation.

The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include Sono, at Villa di Geggiano, Siena, Italy (2025) and The Secret Life of Vowels at Emanuela Campoli, Paris (2024); Sigils at Auroras, São Paulo (2023); Letters as such at Deli Gallery, New York (2023); Rebecca Watson Horn at White Columns, New York (2017); Rub It In at Soloway, Brooklyn (2011). Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions including A study in Form (Chapter Two), curated by Arden Wohl, at James Fuentes in New York (2023); Always in my room bc I put effort into it & I love the vibe of my lights at Starr Suites, Brooklyn (2023); The Practice of Everyday Life at Derosia, New York (2022); JAG Projects at Forland, curated by Jesse Aran Greenberg, at Catskill, New York (2022); Pure Joy, curated by Chella Man, at 1969 Gallery, New York (2022).

Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.