Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to announce The Horizon Keeps Moving, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Jennifer Rochlin, on view in Chicago from June 6 through July 18, 2026. The exhibition involves a new group of ceramic vessels and paintings that interleave with personal narratives.
Returning to the city where she received her MFA in painting in 1999, the artwork in The Horizon Keeps Moving serve as both homecoming and excavation. The sculptures here are shaped by her impressions and memories of Chicago. A horizon line above the lake; the river; its grand architectural legacy; and its intimate haunts (bars, alleys, and decks) all populate her sculpted anecdotes. It is through their representation as in the delicate drawings that unfurl across the vessels’ surfaces that we see Rochlin engaging the city as a subjectivizing and structuring logic. This return to Chicago draws the artist toward the works that defined her formative years, including paintings in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Among them, Sky Above Clouds IV (1965) by Georgia O’Keeffe surfaces almost protagonistically along the top rim of one vase, merging with the narrative landscapes that have come to define Rochlin’s practice.
Building up her terracotta vessels through coil and slab construction, Rochlin’s artworks take on irregular or vaguely physiognomic forms, tracing the artist’s hand as well as the clay’s resistance to it. Across surfaces, Rochlin layers earth, drawing, underglaze, and glaze, constructing scenes that alternate between representation and abstraction. Figure, landscape, flora—all fragmentary characters at once central and marginal to a disjunctive personal narrative.
The frames wrap around each object in distinct sequences, necessitating their viewer to orbit them in order to fully apprehend their rhythmic procession. Some include fragments of pots that did not survive their firing, creating moments of material disunity that come to function like montage. In this sense, Rochlin conceives the manifold quality of ceramics as an analog to the cinematic—time-based objects that echo her early investigations in experimental filmmaking.
Rochlin enjoys the aesthetic of filmmaker Robert Bresson, aligning with the idea that her work should not present things in their familiar, everyday relationships, but instead isolate elements and reassemble them into a deliberate, constructed order. In this regard, the patterns operate as a philosophical framework. Exceeding its role as rote decoration, pattern functions in Rochlin’s work as a threshold between moments and between selves. It is a circuitous choreography, measured in tempos distinct to each object and the time it takes for the beholder’s eye to tour its ornamentation. In the same way everything in life can be broken down into mathematical forms that construct and just as quickly dissolve, Rochlin’s marks in clay (shielded by glazing) meld themselves into the body of the vessel, simultaneously allowing their integration and disentanglement.
Intimate and expansive in equal measure, the narratives embedded within the works range from personal portraits (friends, lovers, and self-representations) to broader reflections on contemporary life, including protest imagery and references to conflict. Her ceramic protest hands, which hold tile placards, are cartoonish, almost monstrous hands, informed by the paintings of Philip Guston. Other Art historical citations appear in her work as well, drawing from a wide range of influences from European modernism to vernacular traditions such as Afghan war rugs. Moving between the reproduction of artworks with glimpses of Henri Matisse and Odilon Redon, several vessels also incorporate newly developed three-dimensional elements, extending the surface of the vessel into sculptural relief.
The Horizon Keeps Moving is grounded in the present: a call to attend not only to beauty, but also to the inescapable tensions that shape the contemporary landscape. It is in this manner that Rochlin holds together memory and immediacy, art history and lived experience, allowing the encounter to generate a charged visual rhythm—akin to the perceptual intensity often associated with the intricate patterns of a Persian carpet, where repetition becomes a site of both pleasure and disquiet.
