Sabine Hornig’s creative work focuses on the relationship between reality and reproduction, which she communicates using concepts such as image, space and architecture. She reproduces architectural elements, removing them from their context and placing them in the exhibition space. She sometimes incorporates large-format photos that depict identical parts of buildings. Her photographs show windows that reflect whatever is opposite them. Their large formats and precise realization result in the photographs turning into “windows” on the gallery wall themselves.
On an abstract level, these elements correspond to a problem of continuing relevance today. Since the Renaissance, the depiction of the window has been the metaphor for our perception of central perspective. The necessary questioning of this convention is a traditional task of art. Sabine Hornig examines the issue in an extremely disciplined way. While her “sculptures with photography” – probably a safe term for most of her works – define their own space in relation to the viewer, their interlacing and mirroring calls into question conventional notions of space. Their dimensions are always human and yet authoritative as well. The works’ proportions require that they be taken seriously, but never overwhelm the spectator. In the best sense of the word, they provide a counterpart. However, this counterpart acts like a boundary. Both the photographs and the sculptural elements refuse to let the viewer in and thereby call into question the vantage point: Where is the observer – opposite the image or even in it? What images confront the viewer, and how is reality constructed within them? Sabine Hornig poses such important questions with considerable cleverness.
Instead of a didactic approach, she offers powerful and convincing material beauty.
Thomas Eller on Sabine Hornig in Artnet, 2008
The fascination for the shop front is a symptom of a growing economy and of concern for visibility, that comes with modernity. In her series of windows, Hornig tells us of this sort of voyeurism avid for novelty that finds something in the transition process but not a finished product, placing the viewer in a state of reflection. In a certain manner this is an emptying of modernity, a criticism of its initial utopias in both political systems east and west simultaneously.
The fact that these images are presented as still lifes proves this. Any still life is a symbol of a meaningless vanitas, of a sin of lust, and is expressed in elements such as the skull and the mirror, both symbolizing death and vanity, but especially impermanence. An example of this question is the allusion to Berlin, a symbol of the whole process of destruction and later reconstruction, a dystopia that emerges from a political and economic utopia the disappearance of which may even so seem promising. In a time of economic recession, these empty spaces may be the beginning of something and not the end.
In Hornig's work there is a fascination by this power of illusion, which has been present in the plastic arts since the beginning. Due to this capacity to replace the world of essences by appearance, Plato condemned all forms of plastic and visual arts, relegating them all to the world of the simulacrum. The copy, as Benjamin states, makes the
work of art lose its aura.
In Hornig, through the use of trompe l´oeil and through the game of perception played with the spectator, we see that the capacity for illusion, unlike the difficult past that condemned it, is indeed a profound essence of all art, and that the copy is a form of granting new life to the existing world. Indeed, Art does not come from something that has no origin; rather it reinvents the world that surrounds us.
Like an illusionist, Hornig is also a player who weaves ironic comments on the scales, on sculpture, on the dysfunctional functionality of spaces and, above all, plays with the spectator’s perception. She plays with the illusion of the interior/exterior, solid/ephemeral, transparent/opaque dichotomies, among others. The opaque and the transparent, in the sense that here the illusion of transparency is an analogy for the fact that despite our living in a world of the everything seen (as exemplified by Foucault in the panoptic system or Lipovetsky in his study on the culture of the screen), we can never really know the totality of the world. However, instead of that vain promise that cannot be fulfilled, we may get to know an infinite world of possibilities. Inspired by the pictorial tradition of the XVII century, Hornig’s attempt to counter the single perspective inherited from the Renaissance, of which the window is a metaphor, has to do with this fact.
In her works, there are multiple perspectives of the gaze, infinite possibilities of reconstruction. This is the origin of the meaning of her abstraction, the offer of a multiple terrain of interpretations that enrich and complexify her work. In order to understand it there is a whole process of mobility of the gaze that demands a suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge states. The magic of the virtual plane that she presents us with is that the image and time are in a single moment, here and now, explaining the inspiration for the title of the exhibition.
Just then, just in this one moment, collapsing time and space in an art that is simultaneously current and anachronistic.