These paintings were exhibited in group exhibitions at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. When Hornak was given his first New York solo exhibition in 1971 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the gallery requested that Hornak attempt to approach a new series of work that would be more accessible to the mainstream New York art market. In response Hornak began produce multiple exposure landscape paintings as well as traditional landscape paintings. In 1985, Jimmy Ernst encouraged Hornak to create a new series of paintings, more expressionistic in technique. The result was a small series of paintings more abstract in technique, depicting apocalyptic landscapes. The paintings were the subject of Hornak’s 1985 solo exhibition at the New York City 57th Street, Armstrong Gallery. From 1986 until his death in 2002 Hornak produced Dutch & Flemish-inspired botanical and still life paintings with four to six inch painted borders, where the artist expanded the imagery of the primary painting onto the border. Hornak said of the development and creation of those paintings, "I begin with one flower, then add and subtract, balance and counterbalance. The finesse of the surface, the sensual appeal of the subject matter are there but the beauty lies deeper in the content. My flower pieces derive less from 19th century realists and/or impressionists, with their literal depiction of color, texture and form, and more from the 17th century Flemish painters whose flowers give visual pleasure, and imply a more generalized reality and symbolism". Although Hornak's earliest paintings from 1954-1969 were created using a traditional, brush application of oil paint on canvas, from 1970-1996 the artist chose to use acrylic paint before returning to oil from 1996-2002. Hornak said of his own artistic vision, "While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are today suspect, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art". In 1974 John Canaday wrote in the New York Times, "Mr. Hornak is right at the top of the list of romantically descriptive painters today". As Hornak was nearing the end of the landscape series, Art Critic, Marcia Corbino wrote, "Not since the Hudson River School glorified the grandiose panorama of the natural world in meticulous detail has an American artist embraced landscape painting with the artistic totality of Ian Hornak". Gerrit Henry wrote of these works, "Hornak is a rather self-explanatory if not wholly tautological postmodernism.