Geary will be hosting an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, October 13th from 6 – 8 PM. This will be Herzog’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
As Michelle Grabner states in her essay that accompanies the show, “Impressively, Herzog paints through abstraction rather than towards it. He is compelled by painting’s ideological and historical perspectives as long as they do not remain fixed within his lexicon of moving parts.” Herzog paints on panel, tracing frenetic gestures into thick layers of wet gesso, with compositions that recall torqued and distressed fabric. Tangled surface films of oil paint act as opaque “grafts” that build to a presence of reflective depth and density, interrupting the weave of painting’s history and staking their claim in the present twists and turns of image creation.
Listening Behind the Vocals highlights Herzog’s paintings as an entanglement of cultural production and historical iteration. As Scott Cowan writes in the catalogue, “Herzog’s gestures are not about the movement of a body upon the skin, the gesso, or the surface. Instead they represent the transformative power [that] motion is capable of in bringing the future into the present.”
Alex Herzog is the on-site director of The Suburban Milwaukee. Selected exhibitions include Kiehle Visual Arts Center, St Cloud, MN; The Ski Club, Milwaukee, WI; Threewalls, Chicago, IL; Mount Airy Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; Riverside Arts Center, Riverside, IL, and Roots and Culture, Chicago, IL. Herzog also participated in “Making Strategies”, a past group exhibition at Geary Contemporary.
