Roger Herman
Roger Herman
Artist Profile in Art LTD.
May 2010
By George Melrod
Like his savvy, richly sensual paintings, Roger Herman eschews easy labels. During the 1980s, he was briefly dubbed a “neo-expressionist.” And in their buttery exuberance, Herman’s paintings do exude an expressionistic energy. But in their choice of subject matter, both private and sociological, and often culled from art history or old magazines likes National Geographic, they are also oddly detached—“personal, but distanced at the same time,” he observes. “It’s the way I paint, the speed of the brush makes it seem expressionistic. I do them in one go, whatever it takes, a day or two. I do not alter the paintings ... I’ll do a series of ten, pick maybe three and do over the others.” In fact, Herman’s paintings are surprisingly formal, examining certain topics—from the staid modern apartment building facades or auditoria of the 80s to the effusive flowers of today—in depth, repetitively, trying different color schemes, shifting the composition this way or that to see what insights shake out. “I go a lot by structure, even if my paintings look unstructured,” he says. “I’m not really interested in flowers, for instance. I’m more interested in structure. Not even the structure of a flower: the structure of a painting.”
Born of mixed French-German parentage in Saarbrücken in 1947, Herman has navigated disparate identities since birth. He got his MFA at Karlsruhe, which at the time had such eminent post-war pioneers as Baselitz, Lüpertz, and Kirkeby among its ranks, then moved to San Francisco in 1979 on a grant, drawn by the work of Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and other Bay Area abstract figurative painters. Finding them “too Arcadian,” he moved on to Los Angeles two years later, and became a teacher at UCLA in 1985. “For a while, I painted huge self-portraits. I said to myself, ‘What does a painter paint?’ So I painted mountains, then Marat …”
Despite his reputation as a painter’s painter, Herman wears many smocks: he was a founder of the vanguard gallery Black Dragon Society in Chinatown; he makes woodcut posters; since the late 90s he has also been churning out ceramics, inspired by a student of his. Today he works and lives in an expansive space designed by architect Frederick Fisher in the shadow of Dodger Stadium; the studio includes two metal ladders from which he creates his canvases, many of them 80" x 72" or larger. (In a recent show of his mountain paintings at the Pacific Design Center, they were too tall for the space, so he leaned them against the wall.) His new works, as recently displayed at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, include florid cacti, glorious interlacing poppies inspired by Chinese painting, and sumptuous tulips based on a 1600s Brueghel bouquet. While one can discern a spectrum of influences in the work—from van Gogh and Picasso to various post-war artists he admires, spanning Europe, New York, California and beyond—the vibrancy, immediacy and sheer delight in the medium are clearly his own. To Herman, painting is not an answer, it is a question, a quest, a series of exhilarating forays, an ongoing dogged exploration: stripping the medium down to its constituent elements—subject, color, brushstroke, form—again and again with each work, then luxuriating in them as they bask on the brink of resolution on the canvas. It is that same open-endedness that gives his work its clearest definition, and intoxicating appeal.
A solo show of Roger Herman’s recent work, entitled “Flora: Selected Paintings,” was on view at George Lawson Gallery, in San Francisco, from April 1 – May 1, 2010. A show of Herman’s “Paintings of the 1980s” could be seen last fall at Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles.
Roger Herman reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
October 9, 2009
Art review: Roger Herman at Jancar Gallery
Leah Ollman
Roger Herman’s paintings of the 1980s, at Jancar, hold up well a generation after being swiped, streaked and scumbled into existence, better than many produced during that decade’s Neo-Expressionist surge. The German-born Herman lived in Northern California for five years before settling in 1981 in L.A., where he has taught (at UCLA), exhibited frequently and made paintings, woodcuts and ceramics prolifically.
The show’s two rooms divide Herman’s output neatly into figurative subjects (his parents, himself, a skull) and architectural (an apartment facade, bungalow, parking structure and auditorium). All of the canvases are painted with vigor, the forms distilled and generalized, the brushwork swift and strong. Most compelling is the friction between the physical, passionate, performative aspect of his work and his imagery of a cerebral, cool, even banal nature.
"Building," for instance, presents an oblique view of the facade of a generic multistory apartment building, the windows and balconies defined in blocks of monochrome light and shadow. The institutional anonymity of the subject runs head–on into Herman’s brusque layering (emeralds, blues and violet beneath the black, white and gray), heaving textures and overall sense of visceral urgency. His empty "Auditorium," a sober scene in black, white and shrill yellow, generates a similar shocking charge.
In these paintings of interior and exterior spaces, even more so than in the more emotionally -laden imagery, Herman seems to be addressing fundamental questions about where painting derives its power — from mind, body or soul? From the interpretation of immediate experience or the filtering of memory?
The questions remain relevant, and Herman’s manifestations of them potent.
Roger Herman reviewed in the Denver Post
July 10, 2009
Solo show spotlights Roger Herman's steadfast talent
Kyle MacMillan
While Roger Herman has enjoyed his share of national and even international success, he has not achieved the art-world star status of some of his peers.This is due, at least in part, to the German-born artist's steadfast avoidance of fads, including the current obsessions with narrative and appropriation.
But as a solo exhibition at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design makes clear, that independentmindedness is exactly what gives Herman's art its appeal.
More than anything else, he is drawn to the act of painting, the sheer exhilaration of putting brush to canvas and manipulating the basic elements of form, line, color, etc.
The texture and gesturalism of his expressionist paint-handling enliven and embolden two of the 7-by-12-foot paintings, both simply titled "Poppies."
Each of these large-scale pieces thrusts viewers into a vibrant cacophony of oversized leaves and blooms, rendered in bright, non-objective colors and set against a white field that seems to push the imagery forward.
There is a clear sense with Herman that the process of painting is far more important than what he paints. He gives his works rudimentary titles, which seem to be less titles in any meaningful sense and more just a necessary way to identify his pieces.
His subject matter is largely happenstance, perhaps a photo he comes across in a magazine. These almost random images serve simply as a starting point, a kind of stage on which he can enact his paintings.
Once he picks one of these images, he often tends to return to it almost obsessively, as he has done in his "Building" series, which has three examples on view in this exhibition. In these pieces, he has repeatedly rendered the same facade of a generic, modernist building with variations in color and certain other details.
RMCAD's Steele Gallery has two parallel rooms on opposite sides of an auditorium. For this exhibition, one is devoted to Herman's paintings and Herman Ship Bldg Bldg ( | )the other to his large-scale woodcuts, telegraphing the equivalent importance these two media hold in the artist's works.
These prints, with their simple, direct depictions of such subjects as a mountain, ship or floral arrangement, are rendered in bold, almost strident colors with a deliberate rough quality.
A striking example is "Tank," an imposing 5-by-9-foot depiction of a tank set against a patterned background.
Born in Germany in 1947, Herman came to San Francisco in 1976 on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service and decided to remain in this country. In 1981, he moved to Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the art faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles since 1985.
Herman is regularly featured in exhibitions across the country and abroad. His work is included in the collections of such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Since her appointment in 2007, director Cortney Stell has strived to raise the ambition of the gallery's offerings, and this exhibition is the latest example of her efforts.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com