GEROLD MILLER

Cassina Projects New York is pleased to announce Gerold Miller’s first solo exhibition in the US. The Berlin based artist will present a survey of major large scale works produced between 2007 and the present.
Since his beginnings as an artist, the viewer has played an important role as a critical entity as well as an active participant in Gerold Miller’s artistic research. He has never offered a ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’ in the traditional sense, rather his work is based upon the premise of an as-yet-unformed sculptural space and projection surface.
Repetition and seriality are important artistic tools within Gerold Miller’s artistic practice. “Every work is unique and changes in material, color or size. These works become an illustration of what `con•temporary‘ means: a temporal concept that describes a process that goes ’with time’. Every series is grounded in a concept that investigates space, always pointing to the future through a process that never produces the same work.” (Anne Luther, 2016)
Series like instant vision, set, and section oscillate between abstraction and reality, content and non-content, picture and object. Their frontal orientation accords with the surface aestheticization tendencies of our visual culture. Random impressions reflect in their perfectly hand lacquered monochrome surfaces. The void of the monochrome is turned into the protagonist, representing everything and nothing, while the interplay of matt and glossy lacquer, or contrasting colors give rise to a virtual space behind the picture plane.
Verstärker (amplifier) is the first series of free standing, not wall-related sculptures in Gerold Miller’s oeuvre. As an open structure of three beams, the sculpture indicates, with minimal means, the basic notions of three-dimensionality that all of his objects entail: height, length and depth. Hence Verstärker literally pictures a fundamental recurring theme within his artistic research: The exploitation of the innumerable possibilities of describing the infinite space.
The result of the survey is a calculated collision of concepts: the real 3D space of the Verstärker versus the virtual space created by set or instant vision. The calm and openness of Monoform versus the defined shape and animated dynamics of the section. The open interplay of different parameters like space, void, form and color as well as the aspect of an active involvement of the viewer contradicts the traditional theory of the image as a static and hermetically sealed object. In so doing, Gerold Miller’s practice connects to the American avant-garde artists of the ‘60s and ‘80s.