'The Man Who Wasn’t There'

'...paintings by the artist Günther Herbst employ facets of familiar modernists’ symbols, as the signifiers for our current times. From Bauhaus, to De Stijl, traces of these seminal movements' imagery appear and disappear in his work in the form of recognisable grids, colour schemes and checkered-boards; a fragmented Piet Mondrian transported into one of his own works (High Holborn 4/Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, 2012), like an unmanned raft left by modernism's drifting legacy. These emblems are the footprints of "modern man". They act like barcodes that can be scanned (or as a form of carbon dating), as these schematic signifiers are encoded into his practice.  Placed within urban settings, they are unequivocally titled to reflect the synergy between these image's indexicality and the settings they inhabit. The world occupied by these paintings within paintings, points to corners of society inhabited by those who have been evicted, ousted or perhaps just forgotten.'

Extract from exhibition brochure text by Juan Bolivar.
 
Günther Herbst teaches Fine Arts at Kingston University, London. He obtained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg (previously Wits Technikon) in 1991, and an MA Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths University in 2002. Herbst exhibits widely, most notably in the UK, Europe and the USA. He lives and works in London.

11 August - 01 September