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Sadie Coles HQ: GEORG HEROLD | ANDREAS SLOMINSKI - 14 Sept 2011 to 5 Nov 2011 Current Exhibition |
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GEORG HEROLD, Untitled (2008)
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GEORG HEROLD 14 September – 29 October 2011 4 New Burlington Place London W1 Sadie Coles HQ is delighted to present an exhibition of new works by Georg Herold. One of the most prominent German artists of the last three decades, Herold has long been identified as a key influence on artists in Europe and beyond. Both in terms of his multifaceted oeuvre (which spans sculpture, installation, photography, painting and video), and his sustained concern with the disjunction between appearance and language, Herold has simultaneously assimilated and given shape to some of the key conceptual trends of recent decades. In his first show at Sadie Coles, Herold is exhibiting large-scale sculptures forged from wooden battens and canvas, alongside paintings made from caviar. The simple roof batten or lath has appeared in Herold's work since the beginning of his career in the mid-1970s as a physical and conceptual building block. It is one of a number of low-grade materials and found objects which characterise his sculptures (among them bricks, tights, tea strainers, and handbags). These latest works depict figures in various dynamic poses. Their armatures consist of sprawling amalgams of wooden blocks, recalling a series Herold made in the 1990s of battens joined in jagged arcs which mimicked pixellated lines. Several works are covered in tent-like skins of stretched, lacquered canvas which conceal this underlying structure while accentuating its blunt angularity. In other works, the underlying bone structure is left exposed, as in Untitled (2008) – a representation of a figure leaning against (or spasmodically springing off) a wooden pyramid. Herold's caviar paintings, which he has been making since the mid-1980s, epitomise his use of incongruous or displaced materials. While Herold has made a number of figurative portraits from caviar, these works echo the art informel abstraction of his earliest works in the substance. Like the wooden laths, the eggs are cellular building blocks: in Untitled (2011), they are variously clumped and dispersed to suggest cosmic or topographical expanses, while in a second large diptych three double helix shapes have been 'drawn' in caviar, reprising a motif that appears in Herold's seminal work Genetischer Eingriff in die Erbmasse bei Fr. Herold 1945 (1985) , where a wire double helix constitutes an oblique self-portrait. Herold's use of caviar dates from the time when he expanded his range of media from the basic materials of his earliest works to include gloss paints, copper sulphate, caviar, and other substances. The caviar is dually precious and degradable, and this paradox extends to the appearance of the paintings, which are blotted and smeared with grease and yet possesses a seductive sheen. As the writer Reiner Speck observes, Herold's works are simultaneously characterised by qualities of Gelbes Elend (yellow wretchedness) and gelber Engel (Yellow angel), attributes which "bear the melancholic gravity … indelibly linked to Vermeer's 'View of Delft'". In line with his entire corpus, Herold's new works are deadpan and deceptively pared-down. They reject the transcendental or the overtly symbolic in favour of multiple and slipping meanings, conveying an irreverent attitude towards artistic forbears from Dada to Arte Povera to painterly abstraction. For years, Herold has been compiling a glossary of actual titles and working titles, which comprise names, numbers, towns, places, and dates (starting in 1950) – sometimes titled Idioticon, and published in 1999 as Liber Librorum. This index of autobiographical allusions brims with multilingual puns and coinages (ars pro homo, 1992 … German After Fourty-Five, 1985 …Nonsens ist besser als Ironie [Nonsense is better than irony] ) and closely reflects the compressed, indexical nature of Herold's work. Liber Librorum also underlines the gulf between objects and their linguistic signifiers, and the potential of this to generate a plurality of possible meanings: Herold has remarked, "My intention through my works is to achieve a condition which is ambiguous allowing many interpretations in many directions". Georg Herold (b. 1947, Jena, German Democratic Republic) has exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Urs Fischer & Georg Herold', The Modern Institute, Glasgow, and major exhibitions at Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2007), the South London Gallery (2007), S.M.A.K, Ghent (2007), and Tate Liverpool (2004). Georg Herold holds professorships in Duesseldorf and Amsterdam, and lives and works in Cologne. ANDREAS SLOMINSKI Europ 14 September – 29 October 2011 69 South Audley Street London W1 Andreas Slominski‟s latest show at Sadie Coles HQ centres on a new series of sculptures of flowers. The show‟s truncated or „broken‟ title, Europ, alludes obliquely to the financial cuts and the economic and social unrest around Europe, for which the plucked, fragmentary flowers serve as metaphors. Wrought from metal, the sculptures also replicate the stylised, planar latticework of garden ornaments, evoking miniature windmills or weathervanes. Diverging and intersecting struts support floral clusters of circles which variously recall fractals, molecular diagrams or magnified snowflakes as the curator Massimiliano Gioni has written of Slominksi‟s work, The basic principle of his art seems to be an inversion of any minimalist credo. There is no „Less is More‟ in Slominski‟s universe. Earlier works by Slominski have frequently included references to the romantic pastoral, in the form of windmills, cuckoo clocks, old boots, or fake trees. For a 1996 show at Portikus, Frankfurt, he created a village of doll‟s house-sized windmills which alternated between naturalistic replicas and cartoonish cardboard cut-outs, anticipating the Arcadian subject matter of these latest works. Yet in tandem with the flowers‟ whimsical strain, the works are rigidly symmetrical and pictographic. Some incorporate diagonal crosses which suggest national flags or heraldic emblems, others echo crucifixes. Mirroring the abrupt abbreviation of the show‟s title, the free-standing works are like national or ideological symbols which have been deposed and have become ridden with ambiguity. Indeed, the flower sculptures share the ambiguous tenor of Slominski‟s celebrated trap sculptures, a mainstay of his work since the mid 1980s, seeming by turns playful, austerely mechanical, or variously symbolic. In terms of their construction, they also relate to the welded metal sculptures Slominski has made, for example the abstract assemblage Sculpture Welded Under Water (2006), which incorporates a rusty anchor amalgamated into the sculpture while it was still submerged. Since around 2006, Slominski has been producing polystyrene paintings formed out of chiselled and layered slabs of polystyrene whose surfaces are populated by multifarious figures, decorative motifs, cartoonish doodles, and fragments of text. The artist‟s most recent work includes high-heeled shoes and a handbag carved from polystyrene, spray-painted in a range of garish colours to create knowingly impractical objects which themselves vaguely mimic strewn flowers or Christmas decorations. These works therefore form an eloquent footnote to the flower sculptures, mirroring their combination of kitsch artifice and highly exacting facture. For over twenty years Slominski has developed an eclectic and subtly interrelated corpus which repeatedly defies recognition, alternately drawing upon everyday objects or experiences and escaping into a quixotic realm of personal motifs, and oscillating between found objects and handcraft. Dualities reside in many individual works; a sea-green alarm bell bearing the bald injunction „PUSH‟ appeals to the viewer to animate or activate it, while seeming like the expropriated, defunct remnant of some displaced, unknowable reality. In a recent series, the artist has hung garage doors on the gallery walls to suggest dead-ends or false exits as well as abstract paintings. The poet Durs Grunbein appositely observes that "Slominski‟s strategy is to make reparations to that which has been repressed (in history and landscape, craft and lifestyle) by concentrating on that which has been cast aside, the inconspicuous, even the strange." Andreas Slominski (b. 1959, Meppen, Germany) has exhibited internationally, with recent major exhibitions including „X Rated‟, me Collectors Room, Berlin (2011, a show which also included works by William N. Copley); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germamy (2010); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2007); MMK Frankfurt, Germany (2006); Serpentine Gallery, London (2005); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2003); and German Guggenheim, Berlin (1999). Recent group exhibitions include „The Last First Decade‟, Ellipse Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Cascais, Portugal (2011); „Moby Dick,‟ CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; and „Vertrautes Terrain: Contemporary Art in & about Germany,‟ ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2008). Andreas Slominski lives and works in Cologne. For further information please contact James Cahill on +44 [0] 20 7493 8611 or [email protected] Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 6pm |
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