Description
ZEPHYRUS. : the Greek god of the west wind.
Ian Hornak (b. 1944 – d. 2002) was one of the founding artists of the Photorealist and Hyperrealist movements.
Born in Philadelphia, Hornak was a classically inspired draughtsman from an early age; he began painting in the style of the Renaissance masters at age 8. Hornak attended the University of Michigan and graduated with an MFA from Wayne State University. In 1968, he relocated to New York City. For over 30 years he was represented by many of the leading dealers in Manhattan including Tibor de Nagy, Fischbach and the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery. Recognized by critics and historians as one of the preeminent representational artists of his generation, Hornak is best known for a significant body of multiple exposure landscape paintings (1970-1985) and Dutch and Flemish inspired landscape paintings (1986-2002). John Canaday wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Hornak is right at the top of the list of romantically descriptive painters today.”
Hornak died in 2002 at the age of 58 in Southampton, New York. His artwork is owned by the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art among many others. In 2013 Hornak’s work was the subject of the Presidential Inaugural exhibition at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington D.C.
