Georg Herold is one of the most important sculptors and installation artists to have emerged from Germany in the last thirty years. He occupies an idiosyncratic position within the German contemporary art world. Herold’s work continues to influence younger artists and is recognised the world over.
Herold studied art for four years at the University of Halle, which was then part of East Germany. In 1973, he tried to flee to West Germany, but was captured and imprisoned. He was only released nine months later thanks to mediation by the West German government. Herold settled in Munich, where he studied art for another two years. He then moved to Hamburg, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Sigmar Polke was a tutor and he became friends with other radical German artists and kindred spirits, such as Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger. As a result, Herold quickly became associated with a new, younger generation of anti-establishment artists in Germany. From the early 1980s, he became known for his so-called ‘anti-art’, with which he rejected traditional artistic mediums and utilised atypical, mostly ‘poor’ and everyday materials, such as bricks, baking powder, wood, bottles, buttons, underwear and mattresses. As a result, Herold was often misinterpreted as a late adherent of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when in fact his artistic mentality is more akin to that of Joseph Beuys.
Much of Herold’s work from that period deals with socio-cultural themes, peppered with commentaries on art history, the art world and technology. He said that he is looking for “a state that is ambiguous and allows all sorts of interpretations”. This radical openness combined with the absence of any unambiguous principle or interpretive framework is the hallmark of Herold’s oeuvre. Whether he attaches a simple wooden board to the wall or creates a monumental abstract portrait from thousands of caviar eggs, his ‘visual propositions’ are invariably mysterious, fusing both semi-readable and utterly alien semiotics. He will often use lucid, sardonic humour to make heavier political and (art) historical subjects more palatable. Although most of his creations are radically eclectic and rarely allow for a coherent reading, a core theme within his multifaceted oeuvre is the gulf between visual perception and text-based interpretation. The titles of his artworks are of critical importance, therefore, as well as the integration of texts into the actual works. Influenced by his imprisonment in East Germany, the wording often has strong political overtones.
Herold’s approach makes him one of the few German artists of the last three decades to explicitly challenge the boundaries of what art is or should be. His sculptural oeuvre constantly hovers on the threshold between non-form and meaninglessness and their inverse. In pursuit of this incredibly difficult balance, he occupies one of the most challenging positions in the world of contemporary sculpture and installation art.
