Georg Herold

The all-too-human impulse to cement meaning through interpretation also accompanies the Caviar Paintings that have emerged since the late 1980s - hardly surprising, given how closely luxury and the profane converge here. They can certainly be read as a wry commentary on the value of art and on the attempt to determine a work’s significance through material equivalence - particularly within a system in which factors such as canvas size or the so-called artist factor, based on reputation and influence, determine a painting’s market price. So, caviar as currency, then. Yet for Georg Herold, caviar is above all one thing: an excellent painting medium. Made visible through the addition of mica or mother-of-pearl, it floats in the binder across the surface, settles, condenses, and in doing so creates contours and forms that the sweeping, gestural application of paint alone could not produce. The sequences of numbers -hovering between code and numerology (and earlier, the meticulous counting of each individual grain of caviar) - complete the paintings with subtle gradations of gray. Viewing Georg Herold’s paintings, one oscillates between reading, looking, and sensing the trace of physical movement.