membership / artist member

Gunther Herbst

http://www.oneintheother.com/exhibitions/currentexframe.html
download cv here

biography

Gunther Herbst was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2007 held at Bloomberg SPACE, London.

statement

My current paintings are a series of works based on homeless shelters that I have been photographing over a number of years. The materials and fibres that make up these shelters, and the way they are at odds with the surrounding architecture or immediate environment was the original trigger. However, one cannot disregard the human element to these images. Homelessness is a morally difficult subject to deal with and by painting these images I hope to confront the viewer, provoking them into looking at something we normally tend to ignore.

Consider, at the same time, the importance of the ‘home’ to the housed population, fuelled by the deluge of home improvement programmes on TV, the abundance of interior design and gardening magazines and DIY stores. Yet we seem to take our homes for granted, like our bodies, and are only reminded of their significance under circumstances such as house-moving, family rows, wars, fires, lost jobs, debt. ‘Many cultural theorists discuss the significance of the home as the most immediate environment in which the construction of personal identity through control over one’s own body takes place. In this context, homelessness can be defined as a dramatic loss of power over the way in which one’s identity is constructed, since the home no longer shields from the public gaze’. (Ledersteger-Goodfriend, 2001: 220)

I appropriate a language of history and contemporary painting practices and use these as a transparent medium in order to comment on the subject matter. In the painting High Holborn 3 for example, I have quoted the style of Mondrian in order to comment on the mediation of the image, and locate the work within the history of painting. I am using these different art languages as a kind of a systematic code in order for the original subject matter to operate more poignantly. My past and present work is an attempt by me as an artist to deal with issues relating to transience and ephemeral structures, and is meant as a reminder that human habitats are built upon the wilderness and that our occupation of them is still precarious.