Oliver Herring: Taking and Making

Oliver Herring’s stunning sculptural portrait Gloria (2004) was a hit at the recent international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. Created from thousands of fragmented digital chromogenic prints, this lifelike and expressive construction exists at the intersection of photography and sculpture and between realism and abstraction.

Best known for monumental but nearly weightless sculptural works like Big Round Flat (2001), created by knitting forms from reflective mylar, parachute nylon, and other untraditional materials, Herring is also a maker of highly ambitious multiple-channel video works, which, like his knitted and photographic sculptures, employ an incremental linear process, gathering fragments into a finished whole. His Little Dances of Misfortune (2002) uses stop-motion video and features numerous performers and sets, sometimes painted with phosphorescent paint. Performers are filmed only at the precise moment the studio lights are turned off and the room shifts to darkness. The artist not only shot and edited this work frame by frame, he also provided the original score.

The Frye is honored to host Herring’s first solo exhibition in the Northwest, which will feature recent sculpture, video art, performance artifacts, and photography. Central to this exhibition is a new sculptural portrait, Leon, which premieres at the Frye.

The artist exhibits internationally and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. Born in Germany, Herring currently lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by Max Protetch Gallery.