b. 1947, Saarbruecken, DE
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Roger Herman is an artist who works across mediums, primarily focusing on colorful ceramics and canvases that exude a casual, raw vivacity. Herman begins his ceramics process with wheel-thrown forms that are stacked, cut, altered, and decorated. Often featuring bright colors painted underneath dark, glossy glazes, the pots range from small, handheld cups or bowls to massive vases, urn-like pots, and large platters. Drips of paint run down the exterior of hefty vessels, whose sides are sharply cut with irregular peepholes and freckled nubs of glaze that lend a haptic sensuality. Herman also employs many drawing and painting techniques, including inlay, scraffito, wax resist, and oxide wash. Not bound by one style, some pots are abstract color fields while others contain figurative elements. Often fired multiple times, the pots exude a considered casualness that is also open, honest, and exuberant.
An instinctual, sensory relationship to color and textures guides Herman’s work, which expands into mediums such as drawing, books, clothing, and woodcut prints. His wild blends of quickly-applied lines, shapes, and opacities layer together in formally intricate compositions. Herman’s imagery- -drawn equally from pop culture and and art historical tropes--reads like an archeology of styles: manga, erotica, surrealism, Paleolithic cave paintings. Like an exquisite corpse, the only prevailing constant is the randomness of choice, the embrace of chance with an inexhaustible curiosity for the renewing nature of the painting process in itself.
Roger Herman (b. 1947, Saarbruecken, DE; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) holds an MFA from the Akademie der Kuenste, Karlsruhe, DE. His recent solo exhibitions include Louis Lefebvre Galerie, Paris, FR; Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels, BE; Praz Delavallande, Los Angeles, CA; Carpenters Workshop Gallery, New York, NY and London, UK; Hunter College, New York, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; and Gestaad, CH, among many others. He co-founded, with painter Hubert Schmalix, the legendary Los Angeles gallery Black Dragon Society, and has been on faculty for the department of painting and drawing at UCLA since 1990.