Channa horwitz biography for kids

Article by Madeleine Morley // Mar. 17,

Channa Horwitz grew up in California during the s: she was the daughter of an electrician and inventor, and she studied painting at CalArts when the messy and impulsive painting style of Pollock had moved out of the realms of avant-garde and become the art-school status quo.

Encouraged by her teacher to spontaneously splatter the canvas with dollops of paint, Horwitz instinctively rebelled, deciding that restriction and a focussed constraint was what she needed to push her imagination to its limits. “If I wanted to experience freedom, I needed to reduce all my choices to the least amount,” she told art critic and close friend Chris Kraus, shortly before her death in at the age of eighty.

Standard American graph paper, algorithms and the number 8 became the ‘freeing’ constraints Horwitz was looking for, and with these materials she created a minimalist universe of tight grids