Andrea Hornick

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

Her Animal History Portraits are meticulous copies of Renaissance - Early Modern portraits of women. Each woman’s energy is interwoven with that of an animal interlocutor’s. This animal spirit connects the woman with aspects of herself that have been idealized out of the image put forth for propriety. In the process, her spirit is transformed; the animal affects the portrait’s atmosphere and empowers each figure’s presence as subject rather than object. A ritual practice that Hornick grew up learning and has since been honing is employed in choosing an animal for each sitter.

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, to display prestige. Each work takes months to paint. The artist works with conservators to perfect the making and application of traditional gesso, varnish recipes, pigments and oil mediums. Rendered in the sitter’s palette, the animals sit in a liminal space, and express what the woman and the painter omitted.

Accompanying sound works and/or text panels for each work or grouping of works contain narratives that conflate the historical narrative with the intuitive narrtive; each equally truthful. The perceived subjectivity of the intuitive narrative points to that in the accepted histories. The perceived authority of the historical narrative engulfs the intuitively gathered facts in authority.

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,” are loose chalk pastel, graphite and gouache works on paper that are inspired by old masters’ studies. They provide an end ritual; a loose, quick outlet of the careful technique internalized by the artist during each boot-camp with an old master.

Text-based sound installation and performance elaborate upon the conflated historical and intuitive narratives. The works are read epic poems that conflate narratives from artist’s historical research with her intuitive ritual to upend the perception of authorship and question the cannon. They are listened to both in installations of her work, to expand and illuminate the narratives generated in her painting process. Or, they are heard in existing museum collections, as in her 2017 Barnes Foundation exhibition, Unbounded Histories, the first contemporary piece to be included in the Barnes Foundation’s Collection Galleries. The museum works encourage creativity in the act of viewing, and lend focus, especially in the case of dense installations.

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 in Old and New Amsterdams.