George Herms emerged in the Sixties as a primary figure of the California assemblage movement, a movement which at its heart sought to unify art with life. In a rejection of precious or traditional art making materials and rigid compositions, Herms wove a new world order redeeming civilization’s refuse with a fresh eye and poet’s touch. This exhibition continues the mission in both two and three dimensions. Where the sculptural assemblages are comprised of physical objects, the detritus of a consumer society, the collages are pieced together from pumped up bits of Madison Avenue simulacra. Cause and effect. The collages are drawn from Herms' recent exhibition “Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown)” at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Los Angeles, an exhibition which identifies Herms “as the Godfather of the spiritual unknown”, drawing a line between his work and that of a younger generation of assemblagists and anti-establishment renegades. Herms’ work is one which continues to bring the world’s flotsam and jetsam together in surprisingly elegant opposition, an impulse which continues to drive artists today .
Herms’ long career includes exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark, the Whitney Museum of Art, NYC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work was the subject of a recent exhibition at MOCA/LA, “George Herms : Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown)” which featured Herms’ alongside the work of a younger generation of assemblagists including Rita Ackerman, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, and Aaron Young, curated by Neville Wakefield. His work has also been seen recently in a solo exhibition, “Chaos’ Job...Restrain Order” at the galleries of California State, Fullerton and currently at “Two Schools of Cool”, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, and “Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1945-1980”, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
