Gerold Miller at VAN HORN

On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at VAN HORN and in the Rhineland, the Berlin artist Gerold Miller is showing selected works from various series. They stand for a radically reduced understanding of pictoriality, which the artist already developed during his studies at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart and which continues to influence his artistic work today.

The setting of art as place and present plays an important role in Gerold Miller’s entire oeuvre. It is about the viewer’s perspective on himself in the space surrounding him and how he locates himself to this. The fusion of artwork and viewer becomes a constantly new process and makes synchronism, simultaneity on several levels an essential factor. In his works, the exhibition visitor can experience the world simultaneously mirrored and real, and at the same time move in a simulated as well as in real space. With his work, Gerold Miller has therefore succeeded in uniting space and time, stillness and movement, subject and object, viewer and work in one work of art.

Since the beginning of his artistic work, Gerold Miller has pursued a radically elegant strategy, with which he says goodbye to the image without actually leaving it. His work stretches the traditional format “picture” to the extreme. His works arise from an irreducible use of form and color. Nevertheless, they formulate a new concept of pictoriality that transcends conventional definitions and already understands the layout of the picture as space. They therefore fulfill the criteria of pictoriality in a conceptual sense that already understands the idea as a work. Apart from the ‘basic conditions’, the viewer receives nothing tangible from the artist that can serve him or her to find the picture.

Through the process of perception Gerold Miller tries to involve the recipient in his or her investigations. He no longer offers the viewer the ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’ in the traditional sense, but rather the premises of artistic work: sculptural space to be formed and projection surfaces for images, whereby his works undergo a conceptual-processual expansion, in which the actual process of finding the image must be performed by the recipient himself. This ‘aspect of action’ contradicts the conventional theories of the image, which define it as a static object.

Dr. Friederike Nymphius