Elana Herzog
[6][7][8][9][10] Herzog's installations blur distinctions between two-and three-dimensional media, eliciting comparisons to late-modernist painting and drawing, yet they also upend that tradition through a subversive, deconstructive process that emphasizes ephemerality and fragility.
[11][12][13] Artcritical editor David Brody writes of that process: "Herzog's ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions—unruly brushstrokes, in effect—that coalesce into powerful storms of texture.
[21] After turning to textile-based works in the 1990s, Herzog attracted growing attention with several site-specific installations, group shows at White Columns, Hofstra University and the Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at Black + Herron, Momenta Art, and P.P.O.W.
[11][31][32] Her work bears the formal influence—often irreverently—of minimalists Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and site-specific conceptualists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well more narrative-based sources, such as Freud and Magritte.
"[36][25][11] Art in America critic Nancy Princethal, however, relates Herzog more to postminimalists, such as Mary Kelly and Richard Tuttle—for her focus on formal-spatial properties and exploration of the limits of the acceptable in art—than to contemporary artists engaging domestic materials in debates over "women's art" (e.g., Untitled I, 1996)[26] For the installation The Carpet Paradigm (1998, Wesleyan University), Herzog strewed thousands of square feet of diverse carpet remnants throughout an architecturally altered exhibition space; writers compared the layered formal effects to color field painting and the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn, while noting allusions to the obsolescence of design and the discard of cultural products in the work's appearing and disappearing patterns.
[30][17] Art in America's James Hyde described the zigzagging remnants as "intimate and architectural, delicate and rough," unconventional drawings with "juicy" surfaces of liquid-like fabric, glistening embroidery-like staples and dislodged chunks of sheetrock.
The former featured the installation, Romancing the Rock, which New York Times critic Holland Cotter described as lines of ripped fabric that "appear to be burning, like corrosive acid in the cube they're stapled to.
"[8][44] For Into The Fray, Herzog mounted sections of stapled textiles on fiberboard on to freestanding metal shelving struts, found wood, and walls throughout the space, rendering armature and art indistinguishable;[1] curator Dan Cameron called the show a poetic, "refreshingly anti-academic" deconstruction of late-modernist painting.
[46][14] "SHIFT" (2015, Studio 10) featured 6'–8' amputated tree logs embedded with textile remnants and arranged on tattered Persian rugs that were surrounded by walls punctured with vertical, sutured bits of a sports jacket.
[46][50] For two international exhibitions, Scale Shifts; Vision Adjusts (2016, Sharjah Museum, UAE) and "Material Migrations" (2017, Artisterium 10, Tbilisi, Georgia), Herzog collected carpets from New York and each show's locale, from which she created largely horizontal works that reference the global movement of culture and allude to (and upend) the Modernist grid and aesthetic.
[56][15] Artforum describes the paper work in a second show, "Compression" (2018, Western Exhibitions), as " intense visual stimulants" whose mix of rigid textures and gestural interplay of fabric and pigmented pulp cleverly blur the categories of drawing and collage.
