For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz

The global Mail Art movement became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in places where artists experienced state censorship, linking individual practitioners with shared sensibilities who were otherwise separated by different political and cultural contexts. 

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. 1932) was active as a mail artist in East Germany from the 1970s until 1990. Using an Erika-brand typewriter, she developed complex graphic compositions juxtaposing text and image. Her timeless “typewritings”—diagrams, patterns, abstract fluxes of poetry, and collages—form the core of this presentation. 

Her legacy is taken up and extended by Los Angeles-based artist David Horvitz (b. 1982), whose experimental and ongoing exchange with Wolf-Rehfeldt provided the impetus for a two-person presentation. For Horvitz, Mail Art still encompasses ideas of distance, travel, and movement. Both artists are divided by generations and worlds, yet their wit, poetry, and conception of art reach toward the same horizon.