Georg Herold never really cared much about myths surrounding the work of the artist. To be on the safe side vis-à-vis a new work by this artist, it is best to assume nothing and wait until you see it. Herold’s modus operandi is to observe before he reacts. The resulting works are often unintentionally humorous, slightly ironic. Clearly, they are mostly the result of dialectic contradictions. The artist does not exclude himself in this process. His steady flow of curiosity leads him to inspect the processes between studio, life, artist and everyday existence.

Herold’s method uses hardware-store objects. The material surfaces of his art frequently consist of laths, bricks or diverse types of wooden waste materials. But he always applies them differently, never utilizing them according to their intended use. Georg Herold, the artist, converts them into transmitters of his ideas. In order to achieve his goals, he constructs and stacks things, he lays bricks, has oven mittens crocheted, or he simply reassembles the supposedly sacrosanct givens of art theory into new constructions. The results of this tend to take the shape of visual tautologies, because the artist loves to periodically turn the meaning of things upside down.

Someone with personal experience in cross bracing when laying bricks, dovetail patterns when nailing laths, or the proper use of a plumb bob will take the construction-site art as an incentive to pass on his insatiable hunger for independent thought. Herold also tackles such philosophers as Wittgenstein, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is also familiar to him. The latter feeds into a rather more opaque background and does not change his fundamental trust in place and impulse.

Georg Herold, born in Jena and trained as a blacksmith, is a student of Sigmar Polke’s. During the early 1980s his allies in making fun of the art market and its laws included Albert und Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger. Meanwhile, he has become known for his sculptural oeuvre, which plays with language-based picture puzzles and thereby questions itself as well as the audience’s expectations.