Linus Galleries, Painting Gallery LA
2014 Artist Interview Series
Artemis Herber
Linus Galleries, a fine art, media art, and painting gallery LA, presents our sixth interview. The Artist Interview Series is a new blog featuring Linus artists from a variety of different practices and backgrounds. The blog aims to be an enjoyable read, sharing insight into the artist’s creative process and workspace, as well as their view of the world around us. This week we feature Artemis Herber and the artful interpretations of her environment.
1) Please tell us your name, artistic practice of choice, and location in the world.
My name is Artemis Herber, and I live and work in Baltimore Maryland. I was born and educated in Germany, where I completed my studies in Fine Arts and Arts Education.
I create large-scale sculptures and installations, while staying true to my vision of sustainability using only cardboard, paper, paint or shellac for materials. My works are very unique with their versatile characteristics. Through the process of folding and bending, cardboard is transformed and takes on a delicate body language. Through my sculptures and installations, I explore ideas of how human beings live in spheres whether contained or imagined. Single segments of painted cardboard create safe, warm realms and remind us of our nature – pliable, easily formed, and changeable, thus simultaneously inclusive, exclusive and interactive. Along with my three-dimensional work, I also create paintings entitled, “Giant Sketches”. Using cardboard, an omnipresent raw industrial material used for packing and shipping everything we consume, I raise questions about urban culture and sustainability.
I represent aging, abandoned, crumbling architecture through tears, cuts, shreds. These techniques provide the basis for motifs of lost spaces, calling to mind a state of bleakness, neglect and instability of those looking for an orientation homeward in a dehumanized world. My collages are many times the beginning point of a new theme or body of work.
2) This is a hard choice for many visual artists, but what is the first answer that comes to mind when you think of your favorite color?
My favorite color is the other color. I start with red all over the canvas it might look blue at the end. The color becomes a new color in response during the work’s process. It is the color of a certain concept, which demands a specific color.
3) What do you love about your subject matter, forsaken places and city scapes?
Being affected, touched and getting involved with everyday topics and matters that create a feeling of alienation through a distant view. Personally work raises interest in political, social and economical issues. In my large-scale paintings I use cardboard’s rough, raw aesthetic to invoke themes of urban landscapes and deterioration. Revealing the apparently hidden, I tear and peel cardboard to unveil layers of corrugation, which I integrate into composition. With its exposed structure of corrugated ridges and its ragged, torn texture, this omnipresent raw industrial packing and shipping material emphasizes the crumbling architecture of industrial constructions. By melding my actions into disruptive gestures generated by the material, I create a relentless, nearly brutal face of what surrounds us. The treated cardboard’s aesthetics of rawness and roughness invoke an urban bleakness, environmental desolation, neglect, instability and destruction. My themes are urban environments empty of humanity and permeated with a sense of instability. I paint cityscapes, forsaken places and ruined constructions on corrugated cardboard which I tear, batter and shape. This ragged canvas captures impressions of locales after storms, disasters or catastrophes – after the experience of loss of home
What do you dislike?
Being exposed to the tension between affection and involvement verses alienation. Tension is everywhere though and that is my drive.
4) What is difficult for you about your chosen medium?
It has its own will and does not necessarily follow my instructions. For this reason working with my favorite material, corrugated cardboard, is very experimental and not always predictable. When it comes to installations or sculptures work can be very calculated and conceptual. The finishing process requires a lot of patience, since I have to create handmade cuts over and over and over again. Some installations consist of 40 pieces all hand-carved with countless cuts into the surface of the cardboard.
5) Do you have any secret talents or party tricks unrelated to your art making?
I love to invite friends and party at my house. Unfortunately, they also have to get creative at one point. Once a year they undergo a pumpkin-carving contest. To reward them, the winner gets an artwork as a treat. Well, at this point the party gets serious about winning in a pitiless competition 😉
6)
Which describes you: Beach, Forest, Desert, Field, or City?
I think the desert describes me best, because I like to travel through arid and vast landscapes. Most likely I find most inspiration in lost and empty spaces for my themes such as urban and industrial motives. I live in the woods. but I think the metaphor of the desert reflects my visions of lost spaces raising feelings of alienation. That can happen in the city or in the forest or everywhere in the world.
Interested in purchasing artwork from this artist or any of the artists featured on this blog or our website please CONTACT the GALLERY
Visit our Call for Entries and Gallery Website
Keep up with our news and updates with all of our following social media sites: