Sabine Hornig

Hornig studied sculpture and photography at the Hochschule der Künste (since 2001 the Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK (Berlin University of the Arts)), in Berlin from 1986 to 1992 receiving a BFA and an MFA.

Hornig's work plays with and challenges the way in which human beings perceive the world around them, blurring scale and perspective. Many of her works combine photographs and three-dimensional structures, often creating a tromp l’œil effect.[3] These stretch the boundaries of what would commonly be considered “photography” or “sculpture” and do not fit easily into any single categorization. Hornig's work is frequently described as incorporating a philosophy of Minimalism, frequently incorporating windows or doors that frame barren city landscapes as well as the viewer's own image reflected in the object's surface. The artist, however, has stated that she does not find that Minimalist description wholly accurate or appropriate.[3]

Hornig's art considers the built environment and incorporates everyday architectural elements like doors, walls, and windows, as well as industrial materials such as concrete. These appear in both sculpture and site-specific installations. One 2002 sculptural work, Balcony, installed a full stucco balcony – complete with a drying towel – floating above the floor in a gallery. In a 2005 Lisbon exhibition, Hornig created a “stone” wall out of newspaper and glue, extending along and reflecting in a glass gallery wall of windows.[3] One major site-specific work is the Glass Façade Project, or Das Glasfassaden-Projekt, which in 2005 provided a large installation for an elementary school building at Pfeuferstraße 1, in Munich's Sendling district.[4] The project features silkscreen printed with transparent colors on safety glass. Brightly colored balloons, bookshelves, and seemingly billowing white sheets appear on the façade of the urban school. The silkscreened images are visible from inside the glass façade and outside of it.[3] In certain works that incorporate architectural elements, she simplifies and omits details like door handles and adjusts an item's scale in order to transform a recognizable object into a sculpture.[3]

Windows are another common motif in Hornig's art, appearing in major installations like her 2003 work at MoMA Queens, Projects 78, with photographs of urban or outdoor spaces frequently appearing embedded within solid window or doorframes.[5] She has created an ongoing Windows series since 2001, utilizing photographs of and through windows. In some of these works the empty windows, and the empty storefronts viewed through the window frame, reflect potential for change and provide an opportunity for reflection.[3]

Her 2013 exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, called Transparent Things, took its title from a 1972 novel by Vladimir Nabokov and explored themes of temporality and urban spaces. The exhibition combined sculptural pieces, mimicking industrial urban objects and made out of materials like concrete, polyester, and aluminum, with photographs depicting run-down spaces in modern Berlin. Both the structures and the photographs subvert viewers’ visual understanding of the objects and the physical space. Nearly all of the photographs are captured through windows, in a manner that compresses and distorts depth perception and sense of place, throwing viewers off-balance and creating spatial confusion that is characteristic of Hornig's work.[6][7] The artist herself has said that she communicates a sense of abstraction, “placelessness,” and “indistinctness” in her work, to encourage critical thought in her viewers.[3]

Commissioned by LaGuardia Airport, Hornig realized her largest architectural intervention to date, La Guardia Vistas (2020), running 268 feet long and 42 feet tall on the glass facade of the Terminal B passageway to the parking garage. Taking the view of Manhattan’s skyline from the airport as a conceptual departure point, she shot more than 1,100 high-resolution photographs of Manhattan from its rooftops as well as from the waterfront in Queens. She merged the images into a stacked composition punctuated with 20 quotations by and about Fiorello La Guardia.[8]

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium (1998)

P.S. 1 International Studio Program, New York (1999-2000)

Goethe Institute (2009)

Villa Aurora, Los Angeles (2009)

• List of German women artists