Artemis Herber

German-born artist, Artemis Herber has exhibited throughout the US, Germany, UK, Italy and Spain. Highlights include Lost Spaces, Kunstverein Paderborn, Room Installation at Munich International Airport, Cardboard City at the Goethe-Institut, Washington, DC, No Man’s Land at Artisphere in Arlington, VA, (Un)Common Spaces at the Spartanburg Art Museum, SC, This End Up-The Art of Cardboard at the San Jose Museum of Art, CA, National Trust’s Newark Park and Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Gloucestershire, UK, and Beyond/In Western New York at the Albright-Knox Gallery, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Autochthon at Arlington Art Center, VA, Erratic Landscapes at McLean Projects for the Arts, VA, Spheres at the NOVA-Loudoun Waddell Gallery in Sterling, VA, Shifting Identities/Humanity in Nature, King Street Gallery, Montgomery College, MD, and Liminal States at The Delaplaine Arts Center, MD.

Herber is a Baltimore Sculpture Project prize recipient, The National Weather Biennale (Norman, OK) Best in Show Award winner, and a Sondheim Semifinalist at MICA, and the First Prize Award at The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, MD. Her work has been featured in various publications such as LandEscape Now!, Studio Visit Magazine, Art Ascent Art & Literature Journal, One Hundred Days by Contaminate, NYC, and in an Artist Interview Series through the Linus Galleries, LA. She was awarded a residency in 2017 at The Rensing Center in Pickens, SC.

Artemis engages in cross-cultural relationships through the International Visitors Program, Research Trip: Dialogue between Art and Nature – Methods and Strategies of Curating Art in Public Space, by invitation from the International Cultural Relations of NRW KULTURsekretariat, and via global artist collaborations and curatorial projects. As former president of the Washington Sculptors Group Herber has initiated land-art and land use projects in Baltimore County Agricultural Center and the Sandy Spring Museum in Montgomery County. As a curator for Transatlantic Cultural Projects, Herber has created Micro-Monuments at the Salzlandmuseum, and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, DC, and currently Micro-Monuments II: UNDERGROUND at IA&Artists at Hillyer in Washington, DC.

Public Art: Munich International Airport, Germany

Public Library Paderborn, Germany

Baltimore Sculpture Project, Patterson Park, Baltimore MD

GUILD Residents Courtyard, Washington DC

About my paintings

Through the use of cardboard, an omnipresent raw industrial material used for packing and shipping everything we consume, I raise questions about sustainability and how human and tectonic activities on Earth create a new strata, hydro- and atmosphere on the planet. Through the juxtaposition of permanence and impermanence in various motifs of our changing environment, I employ several different approaches to tearing and collaging. The layers from papers and corrugations of cardboard are cut, torn, peeled and revealed. This process constructs the medium that harbors the potential to create the backward and forward movement through interaction between painting and tearing, between disintegration and reconstruction of my paintings. I suggest constructing meanings of trajectory of all fragments creating fragility of coherence. In this process every cut, every disappearance, creates a new sense, a new image constantly reshaped in a free manner. My painting process reveals tattered compositions and dissolving surface conditions that demonstrate the crumbling industrial and natural world that we as humans have instigated.

I process corrugated cardboard, the ubiquitous signature for our globalized consumerism, into large-scale multilayered paintings. Through principles of disappearance, disintegrations, collage and assemblage I reflect on the value of meager paper materials. I share an underlying tale of environmental concerns embedded in tectonic activities that shape and change our landscapes over time and create a new geological Anthropocenic layer on top of all other strata.

The three relevant topics of Time, Use of Land and the Global Positioning System intersect between the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. They transform into parables and metaphors of man’s intervention and metabolic regimes. There is an underscore of geo-political issues in the vast field of land-seizure, exploitation and migration that form a movement between material and metaphor into meaning issuing geopolitical issues deriving from deep time, history towards concerns of migration and immigration, loss of home and separation.

About my sculptures

My bodies of work of create interactive environments and speak to the relation of viewer to place and space. In various groupings adapted to any area, the modular sculptures communicate with each other, with the environment and people. I create interactive environments and speak to the relation of viewer to place and space. Adapted to any area, the modular sculptures communicate with the space and with visitors. This connection creates a unique experience while urging the consideration of larger issues of how we as humans integrate into and impact our surroundings. 

My concept roots itself in places of thresholds and areas of transition where people walk in and around a setting that allows new perspectives while being on the move or in a constant flow. Our environment is characterized by mobility and fluctuation. With my installations I prefer to define places instead of indefinite spaces, where visitors feel welcome during a time of threshold and awaiting.

Through my installations I found a way to reclaim those indefinite spaces as non-places of our every day life defining them as personal and characteristic in “feeding” the imagery with emotions, memories and history through personal experiences. That is the moment when I regain non-places as a place, where I create a position between here and there, now and later, between place and space, space and time. In that visual moment I create a warm, approachable site, where visitors feel welcome and can find a break from the bustle and mobility within a dynamic setting of vivid and organic sculptures. My structures communicate through their gaps and openings, allowing visitors to walk in and around while experiencing the place as changeable, dynamic and harboring at the same time.

I create an energizing relationship between installation and site. The pieces can be configured endlessly, transforming any space into a specific place. Various dynamic relationships form through groupings and gaps inviting the visitor to interact while walking through surprise openings in a constant flow of ever-changing perspectives. This connection creates a unique experience for visitors while suggesting a warm climate of living, coexistence and interactions that occupies common spaces, provoking a dialog about space as a field of possible action.

At first the artwork is site-less, systemic and unfinished but once the pieces are submerged into the proposed environment they function as a spatial activator and amplify the surrounding scenery and create fields of possible action. Their scale, color and surface reflection, creates a strong presence in their environment. The segments are painted in vibrant, metallic or rusty colors. I transform the surface into something that appears different (like metal or fabric) through the use of a “natural” handmade process I reduce the product to a minimalist expression in color and form, thereby forming my own language.