Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to present Reflection, Patty Horing’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Reflection features the artist’s latest paintings which depict people in urban interiors, as well as a related group of painted ceramic vases. Thematically, the works share a visual emphasis on the flat glass planes that encase, reflect and absorb us: the windows of our homes and offices, the mirrors of our bathrooms and entryways, the screens of our electronic devices.

Horing’s practice centers on the narrative and psychological dimensions of portraiture, capturing her subjects in candid, introspective moments that offer an intimate glimpse into their inner lives. Her work often focuses on the depth of relationships between individuals and their intimate partners, their environments, and themselves.

Here, within these indoor scenes, the figures are detached from nature, installed in sky-boxes of human engineering and surrounded by interior design of someone’s very particular choosing. The subjects are often doubled in adjacent reflections as doppelgängers or shadow-selves that hover near the original. Among the paintings on view is a suite of five works representing one couple in an expansive private space as they navigate moments of connection and emotional nuance. A large diptych, an homage to Balthus’s The mountain, captures a sense of distance, ennui and longing for escape from the urban office setting. In all of the works, the interior environments in which Horing carefully sets the figures serve to extend the portrait by reflecting not only how these characters see themselves, but also how they might wish to be perceived within a broader societal context.

New to Horing’s practice is a group of flat, ceramic vases titled Imperfect vessels. Their curving and slightly irregular forms reference the female body and the ways in which bodies become increasingly ‘imperfect’ over time, for which clay is an ideal medium. These forms become canvases for humorous scenes of solo nudes, who interact with their own reflections, their cell phones, household objects, etc. Several offer up ‘meta’ moments: vases with scenes of women looking at vases of flowers.