Gerold Miller, The Monoform Show
Cassina Projects, Milan
September 12 – December 21, 2019
Cassina Projects presents The Monoform Show, a solo show by Gerold Miller, one of the most internationally recognized German artists of his generation whose work blurs the line between Minimalist and Conceptual art. The exhibition itinerary develops through a retrospective that presents a selection of works from the Monoform series for the first time: from the first one dated 2014 to more recent works.
The Monoforms are a series of works which came into being in 2014 with Monoform 1: conceptually and formally, they reveal the maximum material reduction of Gerold Miller’s artistic process which draws inspiration from one of his earliest works; Anlage from 1994, a work that established the parameters of his art and challenged the common and preconceived notion of a traditional pictorial plane representing an open space, shaped and confined by a square or rectangular frame on the wall.
It was precisely during the 1990s that Miller began experimenting, often lacquering the steel frames with paint, dividing the middle space with an additional element, or doubling the width of the frame on one side. In fact, the progressive rejection of spatial boundaries in search of infinity arose in those years: a new concept of image that transcended conventional definitions and conceptually approached the use of space by Italian avant-garde artists of the 1960s. In particular, Miller had been struck by Enrico Castellani’s “Black Angular Surface ” for the innovative relationship between image, wall and space, whom Miller met in 1995 at Villa Merkel in Esslingen during an exhibition on the Zero Movement curated by Renate Wiehager. From the beginning of his artistic career, Gerold Miller has indeed pursued a radical and elegant strategy with the objective of getting outside the image without leaving it. Miller, himself, on the occasion of the inauguration of his solo show Gerold Miller. get ready at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, in 2002 declared – “in my artistic work I try to formulate a new concept of image, which approaches the painting from the maximum possible distance .”
In recent years, Miller has pushed his minimalist approach more and more towards the conceptual through the Monoforms: the space confined by a frame disappears, giving way to works composed of two equally proportioned aluminium bars, hanging horizontally one above the other in which the void and the intermediate space in turn become the central motif of the work. Indicating the wall as the fundamental terrain of creation and dispensing colour and form as the only medium, Miller eliminates the boundaries of abstract painting and minimalist sculpture, taking these categories into the realm of the conceptual.
All Images > courtesy of Cassina Projects, Milan. Photos by Roberto Marossi.
