Georg Herold

Georg Herold is one of the most influential German artists of his generation, known for a multifaceted practice that spans sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, video and text. Emerging in the 1980s, alongside figures such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, Herold developed a sharply critical and often humorous visual language that resists conventional ideas of material value, artistic seriousness and formal purity. His works incorporate unorthodox materials such as roof battens, bricks, caviar, mother of pearl and everyday objects, using wit, irony and deliberate instability to question social, political, and art-institutional structures.

Herold’s practice is marked by a continual tension between construction and collapse, precision and absurdity, elegance and provocation. His sculptures and wall-based works often appear provisional or fragile, yet they are carefully calibrated in their formal and conceptual effects. By transforming ordinary materials into charged propositions, Herold creates works that are both materially direct and intellectually elusive, combining political awareness, linguistic play and a subversive approach to artistic convention.

Herold has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Kunstverein Hannover; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Royal Academy, London; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

He has participated in leading international group exhibitions including documenta IX, Kassel; Skulptur Projekte Münster; Biennale di Venezia; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tate Liverpool; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work has also been featured in major surveys of postwar and contemporary German art worldwide.

Herold’s work is held in prominent public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Sammlung Brandhorst, Munich; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Zurich; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Dallas Museum of Art; and numerous other international museum and private collections.