Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art is pleased to present Landscape Negative, Sabine Hornig’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

From the inception of her work in the late 1990s, Sabine Horning has engaged in exploring specific spatial and perspectival concerns and the blurring of the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. Employing photography and sculpture in equal measure throughout her practice, Hornig supports and expands each of these mediums by cross-referencing one with the other.

For her debut with the gallery in Lisbon, Hornig will be presenting one of her preferred subjects, a series of large, colour photographs of barren or abandoned shop windows, where she conflates issues of site and sight, and a new sculpture of a folding screen depicting a colour negative image of a waste landscape.

For Sabine Hornig, the window represents a basic, transparent, grid-like system that incorporates her ideas on the gaze, view, and perspective, which oscillate between image and sculpture. Hornig finds the windows she uses in her photographs incidentally in modern cities, mostly in Berlin. Intentionally made visible or invisible, the window functions as a prevalent frame that contains certain flows, a certain motility between interior and exterior, public and private, transparency and distortion, open and closed space, and associated with this last pairing of terms, flight and confinement. Through her activity of foregrounding the transparency (rather than the transparentness) of the palimpsestual threshold of the glass/window in her photographs, Hornig obliges us to become aware of glass (by means of Plexiglas) as a complex structure, a responsive surface and the window as a doubling boundary.

In the recent suite of photographs of vacant shop windows, the artist not only expands on our awareness of the optics of the window as a sill, but raises these abandoned commercial spaces from their state of quiescent limbo to places where, in their emptiness, we are given reign to imagine past identity and future existence, where our emotions swing between melancholy and hope in the face of our ever-changing, mutant cities.

In this special series now on view in the gallery, Hornig provides her viewers once more with glances of interiors from outside on the street. In these windows, however, the interiors, walls and floors oscillate between varying degrees of demolition and reconstruction; the bricks lie bare in the background of what was once a clean constructed display window. In these pictures, Hornig foregrounds how something has been brutally stripped or cleared away from these sites. What is now given is a dark burrow (‘Window with No Floor’, ‘Window with No Back Wall’) where the constructiveness and sharp angles of the architecture dissolves and merges with a landscape of urban wilderness, a city that superimposes itself as a reflection in the glass. Added to this reflection are the interiors of high contrast. Simultaneously very dark and very bright, the sources of light and dark seem to interact and permeate each other, suggesting the transition between day and night.

The sculptural work displayed in the main gallery is also about inversion. Hornig will show a 5-part folding screen with a landscape which appears on closer inspection to be that of a waste site. The image, being a negative, turns the forms that punctuate this horizon into something abstract: the plastic into rock-like formations, or what may come across as a vibrant, fascinating, brazenly highlighted heap of consumer vegetation.

Refuse, the mangled by-product of civilization is an invaluable source of information on the intimate habits, behavior and status of people, whom artists have sought to unearth and read as text throughout time. Sabine Hornig is no exception. For her, the dross resulting from the systematic plundering and wasting of the earth’s resources stands as a mirror for consumer society to examine and admire itself. As such, rather than depict a lavish and appeasing scene of nature undisturbed, Hornig presents jettisoned materials in hues of gold that play with the eye. Dangerous and fascinating, apocalyptical and seductive, beautiful and unsightly, Hornig’s waste landscapes are a staggering reminder of the human and creative conditions: progress and abandonment, creation and waste, and an ultimately doubled perspective of beauty and the uncanny.