Jonathan Horowitz

Self Portraits in “Mirror #1” was published on the occasion of Horowitz’s show of the same name at Gavin Brown’s enterprises, Self Portraits in Mirror #1 is the effort of nineteen individuals, including Horowitz, creating their own self-portrait using Roy Lichtenstein’s Mirror #1 (1969) as a reflective guide.

In 1969 Lichtenstein completed Mirror #1, the first of more than fifty mirror paintings the artist went on to paint over the next four years. The mirror is both a metaphor for painting, and its bitter rival in the contest to “add to the stock of available reality”. Lichtenstein’s mirrors went so far as to suggest the dissolution of their first viewer, their first subject: the creator himself. Instead of having one’s presence in the world affirmed, we instead discover a disappearance, and annihilation, as we find ourselves instead gazing at our true doppelganger: an empty abstraction, a painted surface, an empty cipher … nothing.

Horowitz presented a series of paintings inspired by Mirror #1. Each painting is made by a different individual and painted by eye from a small printout of the original. Only brushes and paint, and no additional mechanical apparatus, were used. “While the dots in Liechtenstein are a sign of the absence of hand and also a sign of massive reproduction, the dots in the Horowitz paintings trace the body’s presence, and the fact of their hand-made-ness. Every mark within the Horowitz declares itself as human and subjective, a living and mortal self – each mark bears the imprint of the individual who made it.”