Jonathan Horowitz

Jonathan Horowitz was born in 1966 in New York and earned a BA in Philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1987. His practice spans video, installation, painting, sculpture, and photography, and consistently engages consumer culture, politics, race, sexuality, and religion, often by repurposing familiar pop and media imagery toward critical ends.

His institutional profile solidified with his 2009 exhibition And/Or at MoMA PS1 in New York. He is known for election themed works such as Obama '08 (2008) and the multi-venue project Your Land/My Land: Election '12 (2012), shown simultaneously at seven US museums including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York. In 2020 to 2021 he curated We Fight to Build a Free World at the Jewish Museum, an exhibition addressing hatred and antisemitism in American life, and a related project, The Future Will Follow the Past, ran at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia through 2024.

He was represented by Gavin Brown's Enterprise until that gallery closed in 2020. He is now represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and by Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, where his exhibition Human Nature opened in 2023. Most current sources place him living and working in New York or Brooklyn, though one gallery biography lists Los Angeles, a discrepancy noted in the fact ledger.

Horowitz's curatorial and studio work has drawn steady coverage in major outlets, including Forbes and The Forward, for his sustained engagement with politics, media, and religion, and for treating pop and celebrity imagery as material for social critique rather than as spectacle for its own sake. His 2020 to 2021 exhibition at the Jewish Museum was widely discussed as a timely, institutionally significant statement on antisemitism in the United States. No verified verbatim critical quotations from named critics in major outlets were located for this profile.

Horowitz's auction record is Obama '08, which sold for USD 223,500 at Christie's New York in November 2016. Other public results have been far lower, including Daily Mirror, which sold for USD 6,250 at Christie's New York in December 2018. The spread between these results points to a thin and uneven secondary market that has not yet caught up with his institutional standing, with most of his commercial activity likely running through gallery and primary market channels rather than the auction room.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Horowitz, so authentication should run through his current representing galleries, Xavier Hufkens and Mitchell-Innes & Nash. His public auction history is small and shows wide price variance between top and lower results, so any single sale should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark. His deep museum presence, spanning MoMA, the Met, the Centre Pompidou, and Tate, is the stronger long-term signal, but it has not yet produced a large or liquid auction record.