GEORG HEROLD
Cologne
1 Sep – 20 Dec 2023
OPENING:
The exhibition is open from Friday, 1 September 2023, 6 pm
Extended opening hours for DC open weekend:
Friday, Sep. 1, 6PM to 9PM
Saturday, Sep. 2, 1PM to 7PM
Sunday, Sep. 3, 1PM to 5PM
Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to present for the first time a solo exhibition of the influential contemporary German artist Georg Herold (b. 1947). Featuring both historical works and works created especially for this exhibition, the presentation is conceived by Georg Herold himself as an expansive in situ presentation.
Over the past decades, Georg Herold has created a complex and multifaceted oeuvre that includes painting, sculpture, photographic works, installation, objects, as well as texts and video works. In doing so, the artist uses such unorthodox materials as roof battens, caviar grains, bricks, strings, buttons, nails, and other everyday objects. In an often ironically fractured manner, his works confront social, political, ideological, and even art-historical conventions and ways of thinking, yet resist being pinned down to a particular interpretation.
Historical works include Herold's signature caviar paintings, in which countless grains of caviar are spread across a large-scale canvas, each grain meticulously numbered. In addition to other photographic and spatial works, a larger-than-life figure cast in bronze by Herold especially for the exhibition will be presented in the gallery space and integrated into the overall concept of the exhibition by the artist.
Georg Herold was born in Jena in 1947. During an escape attempt from the GDR he was arrested in 1973 and after 9 months in prison was ransomed by the Federal Republic. After two years of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Herold studied with Sigmar Polke and Franz Erhard Walther at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg from 1976 to 1982. There he became friends with Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. From 1993 to 1999 he taught as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and from 1999 to 2014 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Herold has lived and worked in Cologne since 1983.
Georg Herold's work has been one of the most important influences in contemporary art since the 1980s. Exhibitions have been dedicated to him at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, among others. He has also participated in landmark group exhibitions such as documenta IX, Skulptur Projekte Münster 1997, and the 45th and 52nd Biennale di Venezia. Georg Herold's works are represented in numerous internationally renowned museum collections.