Karen Herold (b. 1960) combines painting, drawing, and sculpture to create a language of abstraction rooted in science. Her works feature rich embedded topographies that explore how environment, scientific forms, and genetics influence the natural world. A degree in chemistry fuels her search for the underlying patterns within complex systems, and her compositions often contain standardized symbols of chemical reactions, molecular biology diagrams, and illustrations of immunogenetics alongside equally intuitive gestures. The western blots, graphs of quantitative results, and strands of genetic code coil and unspool onto the surface, intertwining with instinctual configurations and offering a loose aesthetic structure that highlights that most tense and pervasive commingling of chaos and control.
Herold’s approach to the painted surface is incongruous, as it embraces both creation and erasure. In building each composition she considers the angle of the picture plane, the absorbency and tension of the support, and the mixture of the substances to be employed. Traditional painterly processes and rhythmic, gestural brushstrokes conspire in unforeseen ways with sculptural materials such as dirt, cement, and paper. Layers accumulate and textures fold and overlap, revealing clues to the picture’s making. Herold may even selectively cover her tracks to conceal earlier marks with a trace of paint, pencil, charcoal, crayon, or a sanding machine. Natural laws of gravity set the parameters defining which elements are affected by mass and which remain static, but each successive choice and gesture serves as an integral tool in her complex and nuanced sculptural approach. By converging her mutual desires to build and to tear down, she accepts their necessary entanglement and allows improvisation to guide her toward an unexpected and intuitive resolution.
Herold has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Airy, Yamashiro, Japan; Kaus Australis, Rotterdam; and Vine Gallery and Advocate Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Carl Berg Gallery, PRJCTLA, and Patricia Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; K Space Contemporary, Corpus Christie, TX; Art Gallery Le Logge, Assisi Italy; The Bristol Art Museum, Bristol, RI; and Post Gallery, San Francisco, CA. She has attended residencies in Japan, Italy and The Netherlands, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.