Gaps and Glances, Sarah K. Horowitz, Ingleside Gallery
Sarah K. Horowitz, 92.3% of aView from 19th Avenue, acrylic on birch panel, 60 x 40 inches, 2025
The Inaugural Solo Exhibition by Sarah K. Horowitz
By: Kelly Jean Egan
Gaps and Glances, Sarah K. Horowitz’s first solo exhibition, pairs two distinct yet interwoven series: Secret Views, paintings that capture fleeting glimpses of city life through partial frames and hidden angles, and Gender Wage Gap, abstract works that quietly confront economic disparity. Presented by Ingleside Gallery at Ballast Coffee in San Francisco, the show offers both a poetic invitation to observe and a measured provocation to reflect on what remains unseen.
Horowitz’s path to this debut reflects a disciplined creative foundation. Originally from southwest Missouri, she earned her undergraduate degree in art from Evangel University before completing a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University. Her career began in graphic design and publication layout, shaping visual narratives for magazines and editorial projects, a practice that sharpened her sense of composition, balance, and restrained detail. This professional fluency in visual communication informs her painting, where measured abstraction and precise framing echo the clarity of a well-considered page. Horowitz currently volunteers as the design adviser for Wall City, a magazine showcasing the writing and artwork of individuals within California’s prison system, and has since 2016.
The first series, Secret Views, lingers on the intimate spaces of city life backyards, balconies, fire escapes and the quiet rears of buildings, photographed by Horowitz herself and then transformed into meticulously composed paintings. These very personal works meditate on the tenuous boundary between privacy and exposure in an urban environment, questioning how much seclusion we expect when living shoulder-to-shoulder with others compared to the expanses of suburbia or more rural settings, as well as asking ourselves what we miss about each others lives as benign passerby. Executed in acrylic on cotton or linen canvas, or birch panel, the choice of surface shapes the pieces visual presence: birch delivers the crisp, hard edges essential to Horowitz’s architectural lines, while canvas offers textured resistance, adding a tactile depth that complicates her precise forms. Each piece begins as a sketch, then evolves into flattened perspectives, where stark, angular architecture meets the unruly motion of flora, a deliberate tension between brutalist order and organic softness, framed in serene contradiction.
In Secret View from Denslowe Drive, Horowitz’s process reveals itself with decided clarity. Rendered in acrylic on canvas, the work sets the hard geometry of the house and fence against the lively textures of foliage and a tree speckled with gold-tipped leaves. The flat, even planes of the architecture, sharpened by careful angle adjustments in the sketching phase, play against the stippled dots and shifting patterns of nature, emphasizing her signature contrast between brutalist order and organic unpredictability. The canvas adds a subtle resistance beneath the brush, softening the precision just enough to give the work warmth, while the layering of acrylic and ample use of painter’s tape achieves crisp edges and a smooth matte finish. The result is a quietly observational piece, inviting the viewer to pause before a seemingly private moment, caught at a distance yet brimming with intimate detail.
Sarah K. Horowitz, Secret View from Denslowe Drive, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches, 2025
In Neighbor’s Birdhouse, Horowitz turns toward a brighter, almost playful palette, trading the muted tonalities of other works in the series for vivid reds, pale blues, and a striking orange accent. Painted in acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas, the surface supports her clean-edged geometry while allowing subtle shifts in tone to animate the rigid forms. Here, the conceptual thrust of the Secret Views series deepens: what a neighbor sees, a cheerful birdhouse, well-kept fences, sharply defined walls, implies familiarity and quiet intimacy, while an outsider catches only a fleeting glimpse, forced to imagine the lives behind those windows. Horowitz’s method, sketching, refining angles, and flattening perspective, reinforces this narrative distance; the work offers enough clarity to suggest character but never enough to confirm it, leaving the viewer to navigate the delicate space between knowing and guessing. In this way, she hands the viewer the power to project, shaping each story according to their own experiences, assumptions, and desires.
Sarah K. Horowitz, Neighbor’s Birdhouse, acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas, 12 x 12 inches, 2025
Unlike the Secret Views series, where narrative emerges through suggestion and quiet observation, the Gender Wage Gap works speak in more direct, conceptual terms.The series was born from frustration and a refusal to accept inequality. In March 2024, the artist learned that female visual artists (defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as fine artists, art directors, and animators) earned 79 cents for every dollar their male counterparts did. Out of that anger and disbelief, she began these works, choosing to remove the exact percentage of value she, and by extension, women, would not be paid. Each canvas is a deliberate absence, a visual manifestation of what is withheld, asking the viewer to confront the tangible impact of systemic disparity. Why paint what she will never receive? The blank spaces speak louder than any color, revealing both the injustice and the quiet defiance behind the act of creation.
When examining how this series has evolved her as an artist both metaphorically and literally, Horowitz remarks that the stylistic forms and buildings have become flatter, while greenery pulses with life, moving effortlessly to create maximum stylistic impact. Her work now leans further into conceptual exploration, inviting viewers to engage philosophically, consider multiple layers of meaning, and expand critical conversations around the themes she presents. This is certainly achieved when looking at the Gender Wage Gap series.
On a practical level, the series employs color, texture, light, and composition to create a sense of serene beauty, an almost meditative calm that belies the urgency of the issue it represents. This aesthetic serenity mirrors the apathy and discomfort many exhibit when confronted with gender wage disparities: a societal desensitization and subtle dismissal of a problem that, for those not directly affected, or too comfortable or cautious to challenge it publicly, remains abstract and easily ignored. The visual calm of the paintings becomes a powerful counterpoint to the stark absence of value embedded within them, forcing the viewer to reconcile the tension between surface beauty and the injustice it quietly exposes. A calm confrontation, unavoidable yet deeply personal; the boxing ring is within the viewer's mind.
In 85% of a View from McCormick Street, Horowitz combines the architectural precision of her Secret Views series with the conceptual rigor of her Gender Wage Gap works, producing a composition that feels both familiar and fractured. Painted in acrylic on linen, the piece relies on Horowitz’s trademark precision, hard edges taped off and sealed with Tyvek (a synthetic material made by DuPont that consists of non-woven, high-density polyethylene fibers) to achieve clean, sharp lines, yet its focus is the void at its center. She begins by masking this blank square, the absent 15 percent, before building the rest of the image in calm tones of yellow, green, and pale blue. The surrounding architecture feels orderly and contained, but the raw linen interrupts that sense of completion, drawing the eye to what isn’t there. The result is an image that initially reads as serene but holds a disquieting imbalance, compelling the viewer to confront the gap as both a formal disruption and a metaphor for systemic disparity.
Sarah K. Horowitz, 85% of a View from McCormick Street, acrylic on linen, 12 x 12 inches, 2025
Hints of Horowitz’s influences surface across the exhibition, her training in design, the measured clarity of architectural drafting, even a trace of the precision seen in modernist painters like Edward Hopper or Charles Sheeler. Yet there are subtler echoes too, something of Wayne Thiebaud’s treatment of edges, or the gentle brutalism found in early Bay Area works by artists such as William Theophilus Brown, Richard Diebenkorn or Roland Petersen, though filtered through her own restrained, contemporary sensibility. These are not overt references but quiet resonances, giving the paintings a sense of lineage without ever feeling derivative.
Gaps and Glances runs through September 30, 2025, at Ingleside Gallery in San Francisco. For a debut solo show, it lands with uncommon assurance, offering both intimacy and critique at a time when conversations around gender identity and equity remain as urgent as ever. Thoughtful, deliberate, and quietly daring, it is well worth seeing before its final day.
Sarah K. Horowitz at Ingleside Gallery, August 15 – September 30, 2025, Ingleside Gallery, 329 W. Portal Ave, San Francisco
