SABINE HORNIG: SCHULE / SCHOOL: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present 'Schule/School', Sabine Hornig's third solo exhibition with the gallery. Manipulating the language of Minimalist architecture and Modernist forms, Hornig weaves photography, sculpture and installation into a sequence of environments that provoke a discourse on scale, perception, and memory. Playing with the universality of generic Modernism, Hornig displaces architectural structures and manipulates scale in order to present the representational as abstract. Perhaps the most ambitious exploration of her multi-media vocabulary, ‘Schule/School’ serves to integrate of the rigorously formal with the poetic narrative.
Glass and aluminum foyers and wooden pavilions, modified structures appropriated from a prototype for a German school, function as the main sculptural components of the show. The repetition of this institutional building over and again throughout Germany generates for students an experience that is uncannily universal, and specific, at the same time. The schoolhouse itself is a cultural institution both public and private, describing both a location, and a community. Further, the school brings a particularly interesting dynamic to the exploration of scale and memory. As a small child perceives the world, teachers are taller, rooms are larger, and desks are bigger. This perspective changes when the grown-up student returns, as memory distorts scale and nostalgia functions as a filter for perception.
