Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to present “Sharon Horvath: Lovelife,” an exhibition of paintings on paper made in the last two years. This is Horvath’s second solo show with Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

The Lovelife series, inspired by an array of seemingly unconnected sources – ancient maps, human and equine forms, ceramics, and vintage Japanese erotic prints – navigate the entangled forms of lovers at play. Often suspended in constellational webs, the works are composed of the artist’s vocabulary of intertwining lines and pocked by trademark drops. The paintings chart a wide range of human emotion and thought, and are at times a treatise on the wholeness of a human being, at others an exploration of questions of mortality, sex, and the constant chemical and biological transformations that are the basis of human existence. The viewer may look into and through human forms into a map of the stars, giving the paintings a rhythmic energy and articulating the connections between forms and the spaces they inhabit. Slowly, figure grows into ground and ground into figure, until one isn’t sure whether one is inside or outside, above or below.

Horvath, both of whose parents worked with ceramics, emphasizes the tactile qualities that paint shares with glazed ceramics, alluding also to fresco painting and parchment. Horvath works the paper surfaces like a painting, allowing pigments and washes to build up (once the image is complete, the paper is mounted to a canvas or wood support). The transformation of material substance which seems to take place during Horvath’s creative process likewise reflects the essence of her subject. Whether playfully overt or obfuscatory, these tightly-knit lovers seem caught in the very midst of physical and psychic transformation.

Sharon Horvath received her BFA in 1980 from the Cooper Union, New York and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Purchase College, SUNY, and lives and works in New York City. Since 1987, she has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and internationally.

Horvath’s numerous awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant for Painting, the Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Award for Painting, the Edwin Palmer Prize in Painting from the National Academy Museum and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants.