Monday, 16 July 2012

George Herms

Delusional Shift, 2010
Collage on Paper, 14 x 11 inches

 Snow Job IV, 2011
Collage on paper, 26 x 20 inches

Sann Diego Rose XI
Collage on paper, 26 x 20 inches

Delusional Shift, 2010
Collage on paper, 14 x 11 inches

Since the late 1950s, George Herms has been a central figure in the development of the West Coast assemblage aesthetic. Influenced by the Beat generation more attuned to the musical nuance of the everyday than the modernist requiem to order, Herms’s commitment to counterculture is expressed through his repurposing of used materials and his rejection of compositional structures in favor of loose associations of objects and ideas. Herms salvages elements from the trash heap of popular culture, combining them with words and phrases to create final entities that are neither pure thought, nor pure object—they are both prop and proposition. At times, Herms has been associated with landmarks of the developing L.A. art scene—Wallace Berman and Semina, Walter Hopps and the Ferus Gallery, Dennis Hopper and the film culture of Easy Rider—but his art has refused any singular identification. An advocate of all things free—spirit, material, and love—Herms is the spiritual godfather to an art of the unknown, forging something out of nothing, which continues to be a driving compulsion of artists today.

George Herms, Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown), MOCA, 2011 
George Herms, OHWOW

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