David Horvitz
At the limits of the city
ChertLüdde, Berlin
22 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

At ChertLüdde, David Horvitz presents At the limits of the city, an exhibition that enacts a displacement by transposing the borders of Los Angeles into the gallery space in Berlin. Extending the work of California Conceptualists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Horvitz uses the exhibition to explore notions of boundaries, land, and identity.

The exhibition opens with Other People (2022), a room displaying 310 digital portraits collected through facial recognition software told to search for “David Horvitz.” Though these “other people” are strangers to the artist, their faces evoke an uncanny sense of familiarity. By reappropriating these misidentified versions of himself, he interrogates the murky ethics of image databases, often built from photos collected without consent and, in some cases, sold to law enforcement. Originally presented at Los Angeles’s Wende Museum in dialogue with the surveillance practices of the former German Democratic Republic, the work’s narrative potential resonates far beyond this context. It probes the boundaries between individuals and the social and technological systems that shape their existence, while insisting on the software’s inherent misrecognitions.

Encapsulating the entire exhibition is the eponymous work, At the Limits of the City (2025). It comprises four photographs of Horvitz standing with his back to the camera at the northernmost, southernmost, easternmost, and westernmost points of the city of Los Angeles. Installed following their cardinal directions, the artist’s body functions both as a compass and boundary. Through this gesture, Horvitz draws the borders of Los Angeles into the gallery, relocating the city within the exhibition space.

The project began at the southernmost point located in San Pedro, the neighborhood where Horvitz grew up and where his mother still resides. To include San Pedro, formerly home to many Japanese-American fishermen and now the nation’s busiest port, the city stretches into a narrow strip to reach the harbor. Next to this port, occupying the site of a former Japanese village destroyed in the 1940s, is now a federal prison used as a staging ground for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With this work, Horvitz not only conceptually moves the city, but underscores how its borders are constructed, often serving interests far removed from the ones of the people living within them.

In moving the boundaries of the city, Hovitz also transplants his garden on 7th Avenue in Arlington Heights to Berlin. Formerly a neglected plot, the site has been transformed into a living community space through collaboration with the landscape architecture firm Terremoto.

Plants native to Southern California grow in Horvitz’s garden while small tokens—seeds, shells, stones, bells, and artworks left behind by visitors, both human and animal—lie scattered throughout. A ghostly sculpture, created in collaboration with the Estate of Rosemary Mayer, is slowly being overtaken by morning glory vines. Nearby lie fragments from the recently demolished 1965 building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, piles of purple sea urchins gathered from the depleted kelp forests along the California coast, and sculptures made as offerings for gift exchanges with neighborhood crows. Mirrors also trace the fence, marking the garden’s boundary within its surrounding neighborhood. Found on nearby sidewalks, these mirrors form a quiet portrait of the neighbors who once paused to see themselves reflected.

In the exhibition, Horvitz lines the gallery’s perimeter with mirrors like those from his Los Angeles garden. Sourced in Berlin, the mirrors scatter reflections across the room, drawing visitors into the shimmering boundary while carrying traces of earlier encounters. These materials reference everyday acts of place-making and the shifting contours of communal space, while invoking the garden’s defining condition—its enclosure.

Etymologically, the word garden derives from the Old Northern French gardin, from the Frankish gard or gardo, meaning enclosure or fence. In this sense, a garden is both a cultivated space and a bounded one—its perimeter essential to its form. But while Horvitz’s garden on 7th Avenue is an enclosure, it remains open to the neighborhood and broader public through regular exhibitions, readings, and events.

At the center of the gallery stands a replica of the platform found in Horvitz’s garden. Recordings of poets who once performed there play intermittently, carrying traces of that community to Berlin. Throughout the exhibition, the platform also hosts a series of readings curated by Berlin-based writers Susan Finlay and Erin Honeycutt, further activating the installation, and transforming it into a site of collective engagement and exchange.

A row of chimes suspended from the ceiling can be activated by visitors to play a regional German lullaby. The work resonates with Horvitz’s ongoing fascination with boundaries of night and day, sleep and dreams—moments of disappearance and transition, “when,” in the artist’s words, “one can disappear from sight, disappear from the daylight as dusk happens.” This poetic impulse works to blur night and day, public and private, Los Angeles and Berlin.

Also emerging from his Los Angeles garden are sculptures cast from elements of a sycamore tree. The seeds, leaf, and stick were formed from melted house keys given to Horvitz in exchange for keys to the garden. Embodying an act of trust and reciprocity, these pieces represent openness and connectivity in a sprawling metropolis.

One of the final works in the exhibition is a neon sign reading “every small flutter.” Rendered in the artist’s own handwriting, the glowing text continues Horvitz’s exploration of how the exhibition unfolds across time and space. The phrase is drawn from a poignant letter by Dr. Noor Abdalla, whose husband, Mahmoud Khalil, was abducted by ICE in 2025 while they were expecting their first child. Detached from its context, the phrase becomes a meditation on how words drift free of place, untethered and in motion. The artist likens it to a butterfly in a garden—whose effect is small and delicate, yet capable of rippling outward.

In his exhibition, Horvitz asks what divides one from another, and where the thresholds between people, places, times, meanings might lie. Shifting the boundaries between Los Angeles and Berlin, his garden and the gallery, he collapses rigid demarcations into a shared imaginative terrain—one where borders change, abstract ideas take physical form, and collective experience begins to chart itself anew.

Biography

David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles where he currently lives and works. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works—in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services—our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.

Currently, his work is on view at the 12th SITE Santa Fe International: Once within a time curated by Cecilia Alemani. His work was exhibited in venues such as: High Line Art, New York; MoMA, New York; New Museum, New York; SF MOMA, San Francisco; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HangarBicocca, Milan; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Albertinum, SDK, Dresden; Wende Museum, Los Angeles; La Criée centre d’art contemporaine, Rennes; S.M.A.K, Gent; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musée d’Art Contemporain Avignon; Crac Alsace, Altkirsch; Brooklyn Museum, among others.