Alexa Horochowski

Minnesota (by way of Argentina) artist Alexa Horochowski has been showing with moniquemeloche for the past five years. But a packed exhibition calendar and square-footage problem at the West Loop gallery recently prompted her to approach Ryan Schulz, co-owner of NavtaSchulz Gallery on Lake Street. Rather than taking a competitive stance, Schulz saw cooperation as an opportunity to enlarge the viewer’s experience—in this case, presenting a major show by an artist in another gallery’s stable.

“I am always impressed by how some galleries in New York work together,” Schulz explains. Different art spaces in Chelsea, for instance, have been known to organize shows on various aspects of a particular artist’s output.

Horochowski’s “The Unicorn in Captivity” originated at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this summer and was her first museum exhibition. It presents a wall painting and about ten large works on paper depicting slumbering or frolicking pale, prepubescent girls, who look as if they may have been liberated from a Henry Darger painting.

She has explored female identity in her work since an early series titled “Latina Incognita,” which tackled issues of heritage and stereotypes. Horochowski grew up in the rural region of Patagonia, and her memories of playing outside there remain key. Her love of childhood idyll infuses paintings in which girls play with bugs, taunt wolves or ride on giant carp. Horochowski’s focus on this age group lets her address our society’s preoccupation with youth while also indulging a preoccupation with her own past. “Plus, it’s easier for me to draw girls,” she confides.

Plenty of critics and writers have referred to Horochowski’s work as stark. She doesn’t see it that way at all: “I just see it as fantastical.” Horochowski trained as a photographer and printmaker and created site-specific installations before turning to drawing and painting about five years ago. She burned out on installation work, she says, because it involved a ton of logistical planning that ended up outweighing the creative jollies of her initial ideas. Accumulating materials proved problematic, too. “It gets depressing to keep storing that stuff,” she says. “And it’s hard to sell, though that’s not why I did it.”

But her vision hasn’t diminished. “I am incapable of drawing small,” she says. “I’m a physical person; I like the scale of a wall.” She also prefers the surface of a wall, which she compares to paper. One of her first gallery shows at moniquemeloche involved wall paintings that incorporated impressions made from giant rubber stamps that she carved.

Given the ephemeral nature of such art, Horochowski admits it was hard to see her work painted over the first time. Now she works with water-soluble inks and makes videos of their demise as water is sprayed on them, capturing, as she describes it, the transformation. “Now it feels good. It’s part of the history of the space.”—Ruth Lopez