Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.
Herzog's installations blur distinctions between two-and three-dimensional media, eliciting comparisons to late-modernist painting and drawing, yet they also upend that tradition through a subversive, deconstructive process that emphasizes ephemerality and fragility. Artcritical editor David Brody writes of that process: "Herzog's ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions—unruly brushstrokes, in effect—that coalesce into powerful storms of texture." Thematically, Herzog's conversion of household castoffs into minimalist art raises questions about value, ownership and high- and low-culture conventions of taste and beauty; Review Magazine describes her work as a "conceptual, emotional, and gutsy" alternative to most fiber art, which leaves viewers to conjecture on associations between women, fiber and gender stereotypes, the destructive capacities of the creative process, and the layering of history.
Education and career
Herzog was born in 1954 in Toronto, Canada. She studied art at Bennington College (BA, 1977) and Alfred State College (Masters of Fine Arts, 1979). In the 1980s, she worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, including electrician's apprentice, mechanic and construction worker, while producing mixed-media sculpture out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She withheld from exhibiting until 1990, when she participated in a group show at Minor Injury Gallery (Brooklyn) and received a review mention from Roberta Smith in The New York Times.
After turning to textile-based works in the 1990s, Herzog attracted growing attention with several site-specific installations, group shows at White Columns, Hofstra University and the Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at Black + Herron, Momenta Art, and P.P.O.W. In the 2000s, she installed stapled-textile works at venues including SculptureCenter, Smack Mellon, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Drawing Center; in 2009, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art presented a fifteen-year survey of her work. Since then, she has had solo and two-person exhibitions at LMAK Projects (2011, 2014), The Boiler (Pierogi Gallery, 2014), Studio 10 (2015, 2016), the Sharjah Art Museum (2016), and Western Exhibitions (2018, Chicago), among others.
Work and reception
Herzog's art has been described as a mix of visceral color and texture, formal rigor and whimsy that balances between decorative beauty and violence and "ruin and monument." She works intuitively, through a process-based method of accumulation and subtraction that involves improvisation, context-sensitive experimentation, and labor-intensive, heavy-duty assemblage. Her work bears the formal influence—often irreverently—of minimalists Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and site-specific conceptualists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well more narrative-based sources, such as Freud and Magritte.
Early sculptural works and installations
In her early career, Herzog aggressively reconfigured found linens, shower curtains, rugs, drapery and lace, smocking, puckering, cutting and stretching them into minimal sculptures. This work alluded to the body, gender and women's undergarments, nature, cleanliness and privacy. Her first textile work, Rapunzel (1990), featured a long, knotted piece of sheer fabric that hung below an altered, used wooden table and snaked along the floor; in 1995, The New York Times likened her installation of elastic-ringed fabric pieces at the Islip Art Museum to a chamber colonized by caterpillars and candy-striped cocoons or pajamas gone berserk. Reviews also identify Herzog's absurdist regard for the functionality and abjectness of the raw materials; The New Yorker described her 1998 P.P.O.W. show as "amusing, sophisticated formal objects whose poise belies their homely origins."