Decades before Marie Kondo got in on the act, American artist Channa Horwitz was mindfully minimalising the world around her. She operated on the edges of the minimalist art of her peers like Sol Lewitt, but ditched their flashy proto-Habitat grandiosity in favour of graphs, graphs, graphs.
Horwitz’s simplistic, barely-there images look like little mathematical doodles at first, but then you realise that patterns are at play. Each work follows a set of principles, like the rules of a gam. A one-inch dot will rise one inch and move along one inch in every panel until it comes back to where it started, for example. Every work is an elaborate, calculated game of visual maths. The result is a world of monochromatic, geometric figures that rise, fall, dip and tumble.
The principles seem difficult, arcane at first, maybe even too restrictive. But it's the restriction that makes them tick. You find yourself counting along with her lines, trying to work out the pattern, trying to decode and decipher the images. You get forced into her mind-set, nose-to-paper with the drawings, counting, thinking, watching. And before you know it, the whole world has dropped away and you’re lost in the art.
These are simple but brutally effective works of aesthetic minimalism, and more than anything, they just spark joy.