FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Friday, September 8, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of works by Cologne-based artist Georg Herold.

Herold has exhibited extensively for nearly three decades. His "drawings" are large-scale wall installations made out of seemingly simple materials like bricks, mattresses, underwear, vodka bottles, pieces of wood and other everyday objects. Due to these "stupid materials," as Herold sometimes describes them, his work has been compared to Arte Povera, yet his sardonic, dry humor and underlying political message differentiate it from that movement's poetry.

Herold's works typically question traditional views of painting and sculpture while their titles humorously and sometimes provocatively analyze the viewer's perception and the materials employed. In "Suddenly I Find Myself Surrounded by Total Arseholes" (2004) the artist has written German names (men only) on pieces of wood that are screwed together outlining an imaginary field in which the viewer feels surrounded by an assembly of cliché German names.

Georg Herold was born in Iena, East Germany in 1947. He studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich from 1974 to 1976 and at the Academy of Fine Art in Hamburg from 1977 to 1978. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Baden Baden (2005), Museum fuer Moderne Kunst Kaernten (2005). His work was also included in the show Rhinegold – Art from Cologne, at Tate Liverpool in 2004.

This will be Georg Herold's first exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The exhibition will open on September 8, with an opening reception from 6-8 p.m., and will be on view through October 21, 2006. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 537 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.