Georg HeroldMultiple Choice

“Exhibition of the year!”, the daily Die Welt wrote in May 2012! Since the major retrospective exhibitions of 2005, enormous changes have taken place in the work of Georg Herold (*1947). His not infrequently misunderstood handling of the material wood, or of the roofing batten, has been altered so considerably by the artist that it emerges still more clearly: he was never primarily concerned with the use of so-called poor materials, that is, with demonstrating that art can arise out of “simple” materials. The manifold canvas works with bricks or caviar had in fact already refuted this reading. Georg Herold has, however, always set traps for the viewer with ironic titles, because in his view nothing “can be conveyed through narrative if it is not to become utterly boring.” And so in recent years he has taken a radically different path, without becoming narrative. Simple roofing battens, with their capacity to serve as a mount, a frame or a placeholder for something, now become components of an energetically charged sculpture: the new figurative works, formed entirely from battens. Whether or not a taut „outer skin“ is then employed, that is, a specially made covering, or whether the gaze falls squarely on the construction itself, here the batten is deployed with full right as an artistic means. The artist too recognises that a further great step has been taken with this: “Beauty was never the aim; rather, one tries to develop and realise a particular technology, and suddenly one notices that beautiful things can come of it.” The collector couple Brandhorst have been collecting the multiples since the 1980s. Now a large special exhibition has been mounted at the Museum Brandhorst in München which, alongside the collection’s holdings of multiples, shows loans of caviar pictures as well as new figurative and installation works – all of them reproduced in the richly illustrated catalogue.

Exhibition:
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, München, 19/4–2/9/2012