reviews > Lexington, KY

Elaine Horn
Elaine Horn

Elaine Horn has a knack with the palette knife, as well as with the colors orange and green. She applies them equally to depictions of horses, architecture, nudes, ships and portraits. The results are instructive, as these subjects otherwise have little in common, be it cultural, biological or aesthetical. And yet Horn treats them similarly and it mostly works. The colors are jarring but familiar, in a 1970s sort of way. The marks of the palette knife—square, uneven, sharp—imbue everything with dynamism. Her most broken-up pictures, including a large brooding portrait of a woman and a small tight one of a horse and jockey—recall the atomism of Cubist canvases and the heady speed of Futurist painting, respectively.

—Lori Waxman 3/25/17 12:33 PM