Exhibitions views from Anaïs Horn, High Expectations, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, 2026. 

 

In this ongoing body of work, Anaïs Horn intervenes in a collection of vintage photographs depicting auctioned furniture—anonymous remnants of domestic spaces, once inhabited, now displaced, catalogued, and stripped of context. Discovered as discarded images, detached from their original function, these photographs become the ground for a painterly haunting.

Through a layered process—preparing the surface with gesso and working with gouache and varnish—each piece becomes a threshold where memory and absence begin to coalesce. Ghostlike female figures and subtle surreal displacements emerge from within the interiors, as though the furniture retained traces of former presences, of gestures once enacted around it. The domestic space appears here not as a neutral container, but as a site charged with desire, memory, and estrangement.

The project engages with the notion of object biography (cf. Arjun Appadurai, Igor Kopytoff), approaching each object as shaped by circulation, use, and affect.
Interiors shift from functional environments to mnemonic structures—spaces in which memory is inscribed and reactivated.

Horn’s practice further resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where the house emerges as a phenomenological and psychic construct. Inhabited space exceeds its geometry; it becomes a lived topology shaped by memory and imagination.

Drawing on historical auction imagery, the works also open subtle connections to psychoanalytic thought and the work of Sigmund Freud, in which the interior unfolds as a site of projection, repression, and latent narrative.

The painterly interventions do not function as illustrations but as atmospheric dislocations, subtly destabilizing the image. Chairs, mirrors, and curtains appear as latent vessels of memory, dream, and projection.

​

1–24 from: The Call of the Void, 2025–2026

found photographs, gesso, gouache, varnish, wood panel (oak, cherry, walnut, birch, maple tree) or glass panels, aluminium,

all 24 x 30 cm.

​

Selected Readings

Curated by Anaïs Horn

Selection of books and articles from the artist’s library and the Frederic Morton Library

​

Installation views: Marc Tatti