LOS ANGELES, CA.- parrasch heijnen will present Ben Horns: Another Nature, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the New York-based artist (b. 1989, Palos Heights, IL).

Another Nature presents oil paintings that suture Horns’ own photographs of shifting vistas and interiors alongside his interpretations of landscape imagery extracted from the earliest surviving American, British, and Soviet color films, which date to the 1920s and 1930s. In this latest body of work, Horns explores the degrees and modes of realism embedded in contemporary and outmoded imaging technology. Collapsing personal imagery with visual manifestations of a far-off collective visual unconscious, the artist’s paintings catalyze in the gap between the two.

Through the visual apposition of motionlessness and fluidity, Horns’ interior paintings reflect a transfiguration of nature and technology, where each reproduction, circulation, and/or cropping of an image removes it further from its original context. Detached from their spatial and temporal origins, Horns’ paintings are an examination of the landscape as a floating signifier that is both eternal and ever-changing.

Horns cites the 2003 Thom Andersen film Los Angeles Plays Itself as an influence in his engagement with cinematic history and understanding of film’s centrality in constructing how we see the world. Andersen reads movies against the grain—in this case, those made or set in Los Angeles—unearthing latent histories, tensions, and affects. Horns sees the early color films from which he paints as reflections of the utopian technological optimism of societies only just entering into our current image regime. Likening his interiors to the architectural setup of the theater, where the viewer is held in a daydream, Horns stages situations in which the future lasts forever.

Ben Horns (b. 1989, Palos Heights, IL) received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art before relocating to Frankfurt, Germany, where he earned his MFA at Städelschule in 2016. He was selected for the Whitney Independent Study Program, participating in the Studio Program from 2021–2022. Horns’ work has been shown extensively in solo and two-person exhibitions worldwide, including: Flat Earth, James Cope Gallery (Dallas, TX); Autofiction, James Cope Gallery (Dallas, TX); New Social Portraits, Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore, MD); and Ben Horns, Federico Vavassori (Milan, IT). Group exhibitions include: AND NOW @LOMEX, Lomex Gallery (New York, NY); Somnambulism, As It Stands (Los Angeles, CA); Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan (New York, NY); Horns, Kerr, Martinez, AND NOW (Dallas, TX); Everything Is Common, Artists Space (New York, NY); and Condo Shanghai, A+ Contemporary (Shanghai, CN). Ben Horns lives and works in New York, NY and is represented by James Cope Gallery, Dallas, TX.