Born in 1932 in Los Angeles, where she lived and worked for her entire life, Channa Horwitz studied graphic design in the early 1950s at Art Center College of Design and Fine Art at Cal State Northridge in the early 1960s. In 1972 she received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
Read MoreIn 1968, Horwitz submitted a proposal called Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art and Technology exhibition. The proposal was for a sculpture with eight moving beams, suspended in the air by magnetism and lit at varying intensities. Dismissed from working with industry because she was a woman, her sculpture was never fabricated. However, her attempt to graphically describe the movement of the beams with the rules and systems of eight that she developed for this proposal became the foundation for her numerous bodies of work, including her ground breaking series, Sonakinatography.
Horwitz's work is included in Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989 on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York through April 2018. In 2016, The Museum of Modern Art, New York organized a solo presentation of acquired works, as part of the museum's ongoing series titled Inbox. Prior to this, Horwitz's work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Raven Row, London, UK, 2016; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary art, Berlin, Germany, 2015; Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam, Germany, 2009; among others. Her work has been included in major group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2016; Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil, 2015; Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, 2015; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, USA, 2015; 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, 2014; the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, 2013; HammerMuseum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, 2012; Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany, 2012; among others. Her works is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; among others. Horwitz received an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978, and was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship Grant in 2013, just before her death at the age of eighty.
Text courtesy Lisson Gallery.
