Archive

Sabine Hornig at Tanya Bonakdar is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

Photography

The Daily Pic: Her plexi pavilion reveals mirrorings from far away.

articles/2013/02/19/sabine-hornig-at-tanya-bonakdar-is-the-daily-pic-by-blake-gopnik/hornig-daily-pic_eknuze
"Mirrored Room" (Courtesy Sabine Hornig and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; photo by Jean Vong)
articles/2013/02/19/sabine-hornig-at-tanya-bonakdar-is-the-daily-pic-by-blake-gopnik/hornig-daily-pic_gqhrkt

Sabine Hornig’s fiendishly complex “photographic sculpture”, called “Mirrored Room”, is in her solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. It’s a metal pavilion, a touch smaller than a bus shelter, whose glass sides house color transparencies of a vacant plate-glass facade in Berlin. There’s an infinite regress of reflections: Real ones, now, of you and the gallery space in New York, which change as you move around the sculpture, versus other, fixed ones preserved from a past moment in Berlin – which, if you look closely, can be seen to include a reflection of the photographer taking the picture. There are hints here of the glass pavilions of Dan Graham and of Jeff Wall’s street-scene transparencies, but the combination is uniquely, brilliantly, Hornig’s. It messes with space, and time and image-making.

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.