Albert Herter: The Quincunx Aspect

Koenig & Clinton is delighted to inaugurate our new Bushwick location with the gallery’s first exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist, Albert Herter. On view are 45 vividly colored works on paper that have been culled from six discrete series that were drawn over the course of the past year.

In keeping with his previous series, Herter’s most recent work features compact and elaborate scenes filled with de-constructed figures that have been staged in a surreal space. Ornate compositions commonly include two or three bodies enmeshed in dialogue or in confrontation. Amidst the dense scape of detail, boundaries between figure and ground, human and nature, threaten to disappear.

From a distance, Herter’s detailed freehand ink and watercolor drawings might resemble those of Old Masters drawings. Closer inspection grants passage through a portal into the interior lives of the cast. Mechanically hinged and dramatically costumed, Herter peels back the surface to render subcutaneous drives and expose competing desires of his characters. Rabelaisian excess reveals the swift accumulation of jouissance.

Determined yet vulnerable, Herter’s troupe initially resemble marionettes that are incapable of grasping their own strings, and yet latent potentials seem to lurk in the very framing of the engagement. The frozen scene is one moment of many in which a wide array of vectors move around and through the figure as actors are transformed into actants.

On Saturday, July 15, Wetware will present a long-format sound performance. Roxy Farman and Matthew Morandi’s collaborative response to Herter’s works on view begins at 6PM.

Albert Herter (b. 1980, San Francisco) holds a BFA in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he focused primarily on video, installation, and performance. His work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at San Francisco City Hall and Partisan Gallery, San Francisco. Herter has participated in group exhibitions at: JOAN, Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Derek Eller, New York; Spiral Gallery, Los Angeles; and Arthouse, McAllen, TX. A pairing of the artist’s drawings and writings were recently published by Comfortable On a Tightrope and Museums Press under the title “In the Curtyard: Orchestrated Reduction of the Fantasm”. His drawings have also been featured in The Third Rail and Lacanian Ink. In addition to his artistic practice, Herter is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst. He lives and works in Brooklyn.