Fritz Horstman | Raking Light April 10 – May 17, 2025 Read the exhibition press release here. Fritz Horstman’s exhibition Raking Light explores the interplay between light, shadows, landscapes, and voids. Viewers are invited into a world that feels both familiar and elusive. The exhibition includes new works on paper, sculpture, and video. Horstman’s Folded Cyanotypes series transforms two-dimensional paper into evocative pieces that carry the memory of light, three-dimensional forms, and manual manipulation. Created by folding cyanotype-coated paper, exposing it to sunlight, and then flattening it, these works reveal a striking contrast: areas touched by light develop into vivid blue, while untouched sections remain white. They are, at once, sculptures, prints, and drawings, that also continue the tradition of camera-less photography. Horstman considers them two-dimensional artifacts of a three-dimensional gesture. Included in the exhibition is a just-finished portfolio entitled Folded Cyanotypes Progression, comprising 28 individual Folded Cyanotypes, each differing by one fold with the paper on either side of it. Hung as a grid, Horstman has also sequenced them as an animation. The U-shaped Valley sculptures that Horstman started in 2016, began as a study of the glacial valleys of Svalbard, Norway, and have continued as a rumination on the glaciated landscape of the Northeast. Capturing the contours of the valleys shaped by glaciers, these poetic sculptures jux-tapose geology and culture, illuminating the relationship between humans and the landscapes we inhabit and alter. The tabletop-sized sculptures included in this exhibition embody a tactile connection between natural forms and artistic processes. In addition to the Folded Cyanotype Progression animation, three videos related to the U-Shaped Valleys play in a short loop. Blurring boundaries between flatness and depth, form and void, the work asks us to bridge the gap between these dichotomies. Raking Light is Horstman’s first solo exhibition with Planthouse. Accompanying the exhibition is a monograph on Horstman’s Folded Light, co-published by the New Britain Museum of American Art, Municipal Bonds, and Planthouse Gallery, featuring texts by NBMAA curator Lisa Williams and Vincent Broqua, professor of literature at Université Paris 8, Vincente-Saint Dennis. This exhibition is concurrent with a solo presentation of Horstman’s workat the NBMAA. Fritz Horstman (b.1978) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Bethany, Connecticut. Recent exhibitions of his drawings, prints, sculptures, and installations have been shown across Europe and the US. Concurrent with his exhibition at Planthouse, he has a solo exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and recently closed another at Municipal Bonds in San Francisco. Recent residencies include Bauhaus Dessau, The Arctic Circle Residency, and Shiro Oni in Onishi, Japan. He has curated exhibitions in Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Norway, and the United States, including Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper, which opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX in 2024. As Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, he haslectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Lebanese American University in Beirut, The Royal Academy of Art in London, and other institutions. He is the author of Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments published by Yale University Press in 2024. He received his BA from Kenyon College and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.
