[2] Lee Krasner introduced Hornak in 1970 to Jackson Pollock’s nephew, Jason McCoy, who was then the assistant director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

On the strength of Krasner’s recommendation, McCoy and the owner of the gallery, Tibor de Nagy, agreed to sign Hornak to an exclusive contract and to host his first New York City solo exhibition in 1971.

[2] Despite having had multiple critically acclaimed, sold-out exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy; in 1976, Hornak announced that he was moving his representation to the Fischbach Gallery where he remained until 1984.

[2] Hornak transferred his representation to the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in 1986 where he had nine critically and financially successful solo exhibitions and remained until his death in 2002.

[4] Throughout his undergraduate and graduate studies, Hornak concentrated on painting in a realist technique that depicted the rural landscapes of his childhood; as well as erotic subjects that resulted from the then current exploration of his bisexuality.

[1][2] In New York, Hornak was among the first artists to produce Photorealist artwork, along with his counterparts Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Malcom Morley, Lowell Nesbitt, and Howard Kanovitz as a reaction to the then dominant Pop Art movement.

[7] As Hornak was nearing the end of the multiple exposure landscape series, Marcia Corbino wrote in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, "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".

Perhaps, though, his excesses ring true for the approaching millennium: this is 'end-time' painting that exercises its romantic license to the fullest in its presentation of multiple styles of the last fin de siècle – naturalist, symbolist, allegorical, apocalyptic".

Later Hornak introduced Wolf to the contemporary art scene in New York City and educated him on the current trends in visual culture.

Among the artists whose original artworks are in the collection are David Burliuk, Willard Metcalf, Louis Eilshemius, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Philip Evergood, Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, Pat Steir, José Luis Cuevas, Philomé Obin, Larry Rivers, Paul Jenkins, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Leonard Baskin, Robert Indiana, Lee Bontecou, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Youngerman, Stuart Davis, Larry Poons, Lowell Nesbitt, Jacob Lawrence, Marisol, Joe Brainard and Fairfield Porter.

[2][15][16][17] On January 21, 2011, Hornak was interred in the Columbarium of Piety in the Iris Terrace section of the Great Mausoleum in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, in Los Angeles County, California.

Hornak's artwork was the subject of a solo exhibition, on display during the 2013 Presidential Inauguration at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the Eccles Building in Washington D.C. under the sponsorship of the Ben Bernanke Administration.

[2] Hornak's personal papers and effects entered into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in 2007.