Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples.Schmerler, Sarah. "Elana Herzog," Art in America, May 30, 2011. Retrieved May 22, 2020.Princenthal, Nancy. "Elana Herzog and Michael Schumacher at the Aldrich Museum," Art in America, February 2008. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others.Greenberger, Alex. "Guggenheim Foundation Announces 2017 Fellows, Including Byron Kim, Kay Rosen, and Leigh Ledare," ARTnews, April 7, 2017. Retrieved May 20, 2020.Anonymous Was A Woman. Recipients to Date. Retrieved May 25, 2020.The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. 2007 Biennial Winners, Previous Award Winners. Retrieved May 22, 2020. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.Baird, Daniel. "Open House, Working in Brooklyn," The Brooklyn Rail, May 2004. Retrieved May 22, 2020.McFadden, David Revere and Jennifer Scanlan, Jennifer Steifle Edwards. Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, New York: Museum of Arts & Design, 2008. Retrieved May 25, 2020.Cotter, Holland. "New Sparkle for an Abstract Ensemble," The New York Times, January 6, 2011, p. C25. Retrieved May 22, 2020.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Elana Herzog, Fellows. Retrieved May 20, 2020.Einarsdottir, Anna Sigridur. "Textilpraedir ur ysum attum," Morgunbladid, December 2, 2004.
Herzog's installations blur distinctions between two-and three-dimensional media, eliciting comparisons to late-modernist painting and drawing, yet they also upend that tradition through a subversive, deconstructive process that emphasizes ephemerality and fragility.Frid, Dianna. "Elana Herzog: Four Projects for Spaces, 1996 to the Present," Textile, Vol. 2, Issue 1, p. 1–19.Maine, Stephen. "Two Artists With Time on Their Side," The New York Sun, October 25, 2007. Retrieved May 22, 2020.Vartanian, Hrag. "Out of Place: Summer 2002 Picks," The Brooklyn Rail, August–September 2002. Retrieved May 22, 2020. Artcritical editor David Brody writes of that process: "Herzog's ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions—unruly brushstrokes, in effect—that coalesce into powerful storms of texture."Brody, David. "Labor Day Shout Outs: Selected Shows Opening in New York," Artcritical, September 7, 2015. Retrieved May 25, 2020. Thematically, Herzog's conversion of household castoffs into minimalist art raises questions about value, ownership and high- and low-culture conventions of taste and beauty;Leahy, Brian T. "Elana Herzog and Luanne Martineau, Western Exhibitions," Artforum, October 2018, Retrieved May 22, 2020.Sexton, Elaine. "Elana Herzog's 'Interventions': A Micro Interview", Tupelo Quarterly, February 14, 2018. Retrieved May 20, 2020.Basha, Regine. "Interview With Elana Herzog," Elana Herzog; Dewarped & Unweft, Sedalia, MO: Daum Museum, 2010. Review Magazine describes her work as a "conceptual, emotional, and gutsy" alternative to most fiber art, which leaves viewers to conjecture on associations between women, fiber and gender stereotypes, the destructive capacities of the creative process, and the layering of history.Beachler, Justin. "Aggressively Eloquent," Review Magazine, April 29, 2010.
Education and career Herzog was born in 1954 in Toronto, Canada. She studied art at Bennington College (BA, 1977) and Alfred State College (Masters of Fine Arts, 1979).Yale School of Art. Elana Herzog. Retrieved May 20, 2020. In the 1980s, she worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, including electrician's apprentice, mechanic and construction worker, while producing mixed-media sculpture out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Gschwandtner, Sabrina. "Elana Herzog, Shredding Domesticity," FiberARTS, Summer 2008, p. 28. She withheld from exhibiting until 1990, when she participated in a group show at Minor Injury Gallery (Brooklyn) and received a review mention from Roberta Smith in The New York Times.Smith, Roberta. "A Sprinkling of Exhibitions Near Factories and the Water," The New York Times, March 23, 1990, p. C27. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
After turning to textile-based works in the 1990s, Herzog attracted growing attention with several site-specific installations, group shows at White Columns, Hofstra University and the Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at Black + Herron, Momenta Art, and P.P.O.W.Harrison, Helen A. "Grace and Intrigue Highlight Sculpture," The New York Times, July 9, 1995, Sect. 13LI, p. 14. Retrieved May 25, 2020.Zimmer, William. "Sculpture at Two Displays in Wayne," The New York Times, December 5, 1993, Sect. 13NJ, p. 16. Retrieved May 25, 2020.Harrison, Helen A. "Claiming Mass-Produced Items for the Realm of Expression," The New York Times, March 16, 1997, Sect. LI, p. 13. Retrieved May 25, 2020.Johnson, Ken. "Art Guide," The New York Times, January 23, 1998, p. E38. Retrieved May 22, 2020.Princenthal, Nancy. "Elana Herzog at Black + Herron," Art in America, May 1996. In the 2000s, she installed stapled-textile works at venues including SculptureCenter, Smack Mellon, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Drawing Center;SculptureCenter. In Practice Winter '05. Retrieved May 22, 2020. in 2009, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art presented a fifteen-year survey of her work. Since then, she has had solo and two-person exhibitions at LMAK Projects (2011, 2014), The Boiler (Pierogi Gallery, 2014), Studio 10 (2015, 2016), the Sharjah Art Museum (2016), and Western Exhibitions (2018, Chicago), among others.Cotter, Holland. "Peter Dudek and Elana Herzog," The New York Times, October 12, 2007. Retrieved May 22, 2020.
Work and reception
Herzog's art has been described as a mix of visceral color and texture, formal rigor and whimsyHyde, James. "Elana Herzog at Gaga," Art In America, December 2000. that balances between decorative beauty and violence and "ruin and monument." She works intuitively, through a process-based method of accumulation and subtraction that involves improvisation, context-sensitive experimentation, and labor-intensive, heavy-duty assemblage.Schmerler, Sarah. "The Aftermath of Warp and Weft," Elana Herzog: Wallscape, Glen Ellyn, IL: College of DuPage Gahlberg Gallery, 2006.Goldman, Judy Ann. "Elana Herzog, Re constructions: Sculpture and Works on Paper," Art New England, July 2013. Retrieved May 25, 2020. Her work bears the formal influence—often irreverently—of minimalists Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and site-specific conceptualists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well more narrative-based sources, such as Freud and Magritte.Pollock, Barbara. "Wry Material," Time Out (New York), February 6–13, 2004.
Early sculptural works and installations In her early career, Herzog aggressively reconfigured found linens, shower curtains, rugs, drapery and lace, smocking, puckering, cutting and stretching them into minimal sculptures.Zimmer, William. "Look But Don't Buy," The New York Times, September 15, 1996, Sect. NJ, p. 13. Retrieved May 25, 2020.Raynor, Vivien. "Unsettling Social Commentary With Materials as Victims," The New York Times, March 19, 1995, Sect. NJ, p. 13. Retrieved May 25, 2020. This work alluded to the body, gender and women's undergarments, nature, cleanliness and privacy. Her first textile work, Rapunzel (1990), featured a long, knotted piece of sheer fabric that hung below an altered, used wooden table and snaked along the floor; in 1995, The New York Times likened her installation of elastic-ringed fabric pieces at the Islip Art Museum to a chamber colonized by caterpillars and candy-striped cocoons or pajamas gone berserk. Reviews also identify Herzog's absurdist regard for the functionality and abjectness of the raw materials; The New Yorker described her 1998 P.P.O.W. show as "amusing, sophisticated formal objects whose poise belies their homely origins."The New Yorker. "Elana Herzog," Goings on About Town, The New Yorker, January 26, 1998.
Art in America critic Nancy Princethal, however, relates Herzog more to postminimalists, such as Mary Kelly and Richard Tuttle—for her focus on formal-spatial properties and exploration of the limits of the acceptable in art—than to contemporary artists engaging domestic materials in debates over "women's art" (e.g., Untitled I, 1996) For the installation The Carpet Paradigm (1998, Wesleyan University), Herzog strewed thousands of square feet of diverse carpet remnants throughout an architecturally altered exhibition space; writers compared the layered formal effects to color field painting and the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn, while noting allusions to the obsolescence of design and the discard of cultural products in the work's appearing and disappearing patterns.Princenthal, Nancy. "Elana Herzog; The Carpet Paradigm," Art/Text, May 1999.
Stapled textile works In 1999, Herzog began embedding found textiles in walls, movable panels and built surfaces using thousands of heavy-gauge metal staples that often re-inscribed selected patterns in the material.Johnson, Ken. "Art Guide," The New York Times, July 12, 2002, p. E37. Retrieved May 22, 2020.Cotter, Holland. "Sampling Brooklyn," The New York Times, January 23, 2004, p. E27. Retrieved May 22, 2020. She then deconstructed them through a process of shredding, pulling and cutting; the remaining fragments maintained the rectangular formats of her sources in ghostly, afterimage-like forms that dissolve distinctions between figure and ground.Schmerler, Sarah. "Fit," Time Out (New York), June 27–July 4, 2002. Critics suggest that Herzog's disintegrating imagery and hands-on, violent process of de-materialization both acknowledge and undermine relationships to late-modernist and domestic-craft traditions, while suggesting geological-archaeological and historical themes of impermanence, decay, erosion, memory, absence and presence.Pristoop, Rebecca. "Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance," Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, 2016.
Herzog first exhibited this work in shows at the Kohler Arts Center and GAGA ("Projected") in 2000. Her GAGA exhibition featured six sections of a shredded red bedspread embedded in panels that she integrated with gallery walls to suggest pieces created in situ, rather than modular units. Art in America'''s James Hyde described the zigzagging remnants as "intimate and architectural, delicate and rough," unconventional drawings with "juicy" surfaces of liquid-like fabric, glistening embroidery-like staples and dislodged chunks of sheetrock. Writers such as Barbara Pollock termed later works "monumental friezes" that recalled Stella's stripe paintings or the monolithic rectangles of Barnett Newman.