KURT HERRMANN

Kurt Herrmann: “Forest Waves” is my second solo show at Houska Gallery. Building on my inaugural show “Crispy Clouds” from last year, I continue to explore the beauty and power of shape and color. The new show spans a wide range from the minimal and abstract to paintings where identifiable elements are clearly beginning to surface. It’s very hard to pinpoint what inspires each painting, but over time, I am becoming more aware of how deeply embedded the landscape, the seasons, and the colors of the Appalachian Mountains are in everything I do. Sometimes, literal references to the hills and streams that I love will populate my canvases more overtly, like in “Forest Waves”, “Night Hatch”, and “Catchin Crawdad”. There are critters, forest canopies, rivers, the sun, clouds, and even the breeze. But after a while, I will usually circle back to something more minimal, like “Cirrus Highball”, “Dungaree Sun”, and “Float Rig Wizzer”, where the same sources of inspiration are simply interpreted in a more distilled and poetic manner. The blue sky from a spring day can be the entire launchpad for a painting. The color and minimal shapes are themselves the story. I don’t fully understand how it all works, and I don’t think I need to.

*More insight into Kurt’s Color Bomb Series: “Color does not need to represent anything other than itself. It is universal yet nothing is more personal. And that’s how I present these paintings. I’m distilling something that struck me, but the interpretations and feelings they provoke in others can be infinite. I want the Color Bombs to radiate across the room, but to also whisper quietly beside you. I want a big sound and silence. Many of my shapes, forms, and colors have been extracted from the mountains of Pennsylvania, where I live and work, but I also sample bits and pieces of memories and places I’ve never been. There are trunks of trees, winter skies, deer legs, the pink from a summer watermelon, and Greek islands I’ve always wanted to see. These are some of the sparks that start a painting, but they are not the whole story. Even if a painting was initially inspired by something exotic, or an extremely personal event on the other side of the planet, all my work is filtered through my studio in the hills of Appalachia. The colors, silence, space, seasons, landscape, and even the rednecks impact everything I make. It’s inescapable”.

Kurt Herrmann (b. 1972, Lock Haven, USA) is a painter from the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania who does both figurative and abstract work, but above all is a colorist at heart. Two of his recent shows were featured in Time Out Chicago and the Philadelphia Inquirer, with recent shows in Tasmania (Penny Contemporary), New Orleans (Octavia Gallery), Auckland (12 Gallery), Philadelphia (James Oliver Gallery), and Sydney (Traffic Jam Galleries). His work is in prominent collections across the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, including Capitol One Corporate Headquarters (Wilmington, DE), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY), and Temple University (Philadelphia, PA). Recent commissions include large work for Hotel Del Coronado (San Diego, CA), and a line of beer labels for Elk Creek Café + Aleworks (Millheim, PA). Although his exhibition schedule is increasingly international, Herrmann’s rural Pennsylvania roots continue to influence his work.