Artist Reception
Saturday, March 14, 5–7pm
Live music performance by the artist at 6pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Folded Worlds, Fritz Horstman’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view March 7 through April 25, 2026. Bringing together the Connecticut-based artist’s Folded Cyanotypes—including the largest he has made—and a new body of Folded Palladiums, the exhibition pairs the two series in a single, concentrated installation. In the lineage of camera-less photographic practice, Horstman treats the fold as a formal premise—a rigorous syntax through which light and surface articulate structure. The resulting images hold a particular kind of clarity: planar and spatial at once, diagrammatic and atmospheric, precise in construction and expansive in effect.
The artist writes: "Folded Cyanotypes and Folded Palladiums are closely related bodies of work that use historic photo processes to create works on paper. Employing two different papers—one very crisp and high in mulberry content, the other fine and cotton-based—I first create a specific folding pattern. The paper is then coated with either cyanotype fluid or platinum-palladium fluid, refolded, then exposed to light. After that, I rinse the paper in fixative to reveal the image, simultaneously flattening it. The Folded Cyanotypes produce a pattern in which the areas where light touched the paper during exposure turn blue, while the areas that stayed in shadow remain white. Folded Palladiums show a gradation of blacks, whites, and grays in various geometric and geomorphic patterns, also determined by the folding pattern. In both cases, the images are at once a description of the folding process that created them and something far more subjective. Silvery tones float like smoke over heavy blocks. Perceived space ebbs and flows over curving biomorphic forms. The folding patterns are my own invention, often inspired by natural forms or an expansion on the vast catalog of known folds.
The fields of camera-less photography, printmaking, sculpture, and drawing all inform the work. Though under close inspection, slight undulations in the paper from its previously folded state can be seen, the result is objectively quite flat. However, our perception of it can be anything but. That tension between two- and three-dimensional space allows us to consider the phenomenon of perception, while providing a window into the process and materials involved in the creation of the image. I often think about the difference between what we see and what we understand, between physical fact and psychic effect. My Folded Palladiums and Folded Cyanotypes exist in space between those dueling aspects of our perception."—Fritz Horstman, 2026
Fritz Horstman (b. 1978, Albion, Michigan) is an artist, educator, and curator based in Bethany, Connecticut. A solo exhibition of Horstman's recent work was on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, from September 2024 through July 2025. Accompanying the exhibition, a book of Horstman’s Folded Cyanotypes has been co-published by the museum, Municipal Bonds, and Planthouse, New York. Recent selected exhibitions include Planthouse (solo); Municipal Bonds (solo); Jennifer Terzian Gallery (solo), Litchfield, Connecticut; Ishibashi Gallery (solo), Concord, Massachusetts; Seton Hill University (solo), Greensburg, Pennsylvania; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Martin Museum at Baylor University; drj art projects, Berlin, Germany; and Arctic Hysteria, Bergen, Norway, and St. Petersburg, Russia. He has permanently installed sculptures in Ås, Norway, and at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.
Recent curatorial projects include Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; Anni Albers: Work with Materials at the Syracuse University Art Museum, New York; In Thread and On Paper: Anni Albers in Connecticut at the New Britain Museum of American Art; Becoming Trees at Concord Art in Concord, Massachusetts; and Water Access at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Recent awards and residencies include the Connecticut Artist Fellowship; Tusen Takk Residency in northern Michigan; Bauhaus Dessau Artist-in-Residence; the Arctic Circle Residency; and Shiro Oni Residency, Onishi, Japan. He has lectured and led workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Lebanese American University in Beirut, the Royal Academy of Art in London, MoMA, and numerous other institutions.
Since 2004, he has worked with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where he is Education Director. He is the author of Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers's Color Experiments, published by Yale University Press in 2024. He received his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and his BA from Kenyon College. He is represented by Municipal Bonds.
