Howard Hersh

to structure / a structure

HOWARD HERSH

to structure / a structure

California State University, Stanislaus

August 19 – October 11, 2024

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

to structure / a structure – Represents a chance to view the amazing work of Howard Hersh. When I was a young person I was lucky to grow up in the Los Angeles area, an area full of great art galleries and museums. I was also fortunate to be able to see many great works of art in person from an early age. For me my love of geometric art work has been a wonderful journey, starting first with a chance meeting of the hard edge painter Karl Benjamin. I was in school studying to be a kindergarten teacher and went to the Claremont Reading Conference at Claremont Graduate University, and at an after-conference event at Karl and Beverly Benjamin’s home, I went to the back yard to look Karl’s art studio and it made me so excited about painting that the next semester in school I changed my major to art.

My next step in the evolution of looking for geometric painting was in a Modern Art Class; the professor of the class Dr. Marion Henderson had a lecture on geometric painting and there was Frank Stella and his black paintings. Ever since that day it has influenced my work and the work that I most enjoy looking at. Since the beginning of my journey I have constantly looked for other artists that create geometric work. I had been seeing the work of Howard Hersh for a number of years and to my utter joy I was able to show with him in a two-person exhibition at Duval Contemporary in San Francisco, CA. The chance to meet Howard and to talk to him about his work and his use of geometric and illusionistic space lead to this exhibition and we are very lucky to be able to experience this large body of his work.

Painting is one of the Art Department’s fundamental areas of educating new artists. Having exceptional and varied exhibitions of painting in our galleries helps to generate meaningful discussions and lifelong learning about the art of painting. The University Art Gallery’s programing helps to support our faculty’s teaching. It is through faculty recommendations that many exhibitions come to our galleries. I am very happy to be able to exhibit Howard’s work for others to enjoy.

I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Howard Hersh for the chance of exhibiting his work, Beth Waldman and Dewitt Cheng for their insightful writing, Brad Peatross of the School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design and Repro Graphics, California State University, Stanislaus for the printing this catalog. Many thanks to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker,

Director, University Art Gallery

California State University, Stanislaus

THE YIELDING POINT

by Beth Waldman

Ingrained in the multi-dimensional work featured in to structure / a structure by San Francisco based artist Howard Hersh is an inclusive sense of freedom. Spanning just over 10 years of work, this exhibition returns to his philosophical and spiritual idea of universality and connection. Through material, paint and line, Hersh offers various entry points informed by geometry incorporating spatial and optical illusions. For thousands of years, humans have pushed the relationships found in geometry as a way to examine the connection to the earth and beyond. Simple forms such as the circle and the square have been the basis for what evolved to be complex religious and political systems still dependent on the order geometry provides. Indeed, Hersh’s manipulation and extension of the grid is also reflective of his time on this planet.

Having grown up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Hersh’s environment was an artistic landscape valuing freedom more than history, self-permission to experiment rather than beholden themselves to movements coming from Europe. There, artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Edward Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston amongst others gathered together, meeting at Barney’s Beanery in support and exchange about life more than art. In their studios, they created work without bounds like nothing the art world had never experienced before. New York artists such as Andy Warhol and David Hockney who pushed acrylic paint into the forefront of Fine Art were attracted to this freedom and migrated to LA. Quickly, this blossoming new arts scene was drawing the attention from the New York galleries and with them expanding opportunities for LA artists. Hersh was coming of age into adulthood in the midst of it all.

Hersh’s relationship to structure is founded in its polarization of traditional ideas of geometry and rules. Seeing the more basic groundwork as an opportunity to explore the notion that anything was possible, he felt deeply akin to the concept of ‘what if’ expressed by admired artist Leonardo Drew during a talk at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. From his independence from the structure of home while he lived off the land as a young adult to the LA arts scene that surrounded him subconsciously in his youth, the idea of living without boundaries was deeply ingrained in Hersh. Simultaneously, he was carrying his family’s lineage of making art over four generations. Combining his genetic grounding in art with the newfound freedoms of expression of the times created a “perfect creative storm” for Hersh to begin his career. Using elements from his early encaustic ethereal paintings influenced by the work of San Francisco Bay Area artist Nathan Olivera, Hersh returned to the exploration of diagrammatic structures within grids which still leads the conceptual thread in his work today. Additionally, the earliest works in this exhibit push into a perceived 4th dimension as seen in Roberto Matta’s own psychological morphologies. Like Matta, Hersh gives much weight to philosophy in the development of his work creating space beyond the visible, conventional perspective.

Hersh’s early interests in architecture from imaginative times as a child to more serious career considerations into his adulthood returned him to his constructive nature in the studio in 2014 when he started the “Skin Deep Series”, and in 2018 with the creation of his “Migration Series”. The raw application of paint with wide trowels and floating geometric formations in the foreground confront the viewer with raw authenticity of material and paint embracing sculptural and painterly languages simultaneously. Artists such as Sam Gillian

and Robert Rauschenberg had clearly broken those boundaries already; Hersh benefited from that freedom. Emerging from geometrically based abstractions, the structural imagery evolved into structures themselves. Hersh found his way back to his roots as a maker, resulting in a pivotal extension of his two dimensional work to the third dimension. Structure as a noun, also became structure as a verb. Hence, the title of the exhibition, to structure / a structure

Moving on in 2020, Hersh’s ongoing “Roundabout Series” has been able to encapsulate his philosophy that just like life, there is no specific entry or exit. Pushing beyond the rectangle, lines of black, white and orange carry the eye off the work into the sky as well as the ground and every direction in between. In contrast to the defined perspectives of the Renaissance that pointed towards one source of power, these works offer endless perspectives that seem to allude towards ideas of magnetism and string theory more than any one deity. There is a strong linear exchange of energy from one point to another and back again. There is also a great sense of connection and giving back to the universe from multiple touch points. The “Roundabout” series seems to connect his work in a direct way with what perhaps were subconscious influences from his early Los Angeles landscape.

With a monochromatic approach, his most recent series, “Timelines” is a technical leap for Hersh with his refined lines and manipulation of the eye causing these 2D works to easily read as 3D. For Hersh, the motif of gradation assumes a metaphor with his life in the studio and temporality more broadly, producing distinct bodies of work in succession. As well, gradation evokes social themes: of difference, context, and still ultimately, interdependency. The intention surrounding the control of gradients of color and form resulted in his most optical and illusionist work to date. They almost seem to float off the wall as sculpture does, sharing ground with its viewer.

Hersh brings an authentic truth to his viewers in which they can experience their own space through his inviting open channels of color, form and material. Such as with his minimal reveal of the raw basswood on the side of each work in the “Skin Deep Series”, he draws us into his constructive work where there is recognition of the art as an object through which material reveals universal access to a space of Oneness. Within these networks of color, line and construction, the presented work in to structure / a structure offers us the opportunity to stop, to yield, to enter, and to exit without bounds.

Dzine gallery installation, 2018

HOWARD HERSH: A PAINTER’S PROGRESS

by Dewitt Cheng

It’s not work. It’s my life. Art is what I do.

—Howard Hersh in Daman-Karlin video interview, 2022

The art world giveth and the art world taketh. Success in the visual arts has always been a gamble—albeit one that ambitious young artists take on readily. In recent years, the vagaries of art fashion and art theory, the depredations of the art market, and the influences of technology and fashion have further complicated the idea of a career path based on creative development, of developing one’s potentialities through work: expressing a philosophy of life not in theories but in art materials.

Considered in this context, the career of the San Francisco artist Howard Hersh is heartening. Now in his seventies, Hersh always enjoyed making objects (as his grandfather and father did), but did not get serious about art as a career until he was thirty, having made a living in a variety of rural jobs during his peripatetic twenties. He is self-taught (though knowledgeable about the artists he admires), and thus an exemplar for independent-minded auto-didacts and studio solitaries. Hersh exhibited his encaustic (heated wax) paintings in Santa Fe in the mid-80s, which the philosophically-minded artist considers “the right time, the right place.” In the forty-plus ensuing years, Hersh’s striking abstract paintings in both encaustic and acrylic have been exhibited coast to coast in the United States, and Hong Kong. His work have also been collected by a dozen museums. Hersh has had a studio at Hunters Point Shipyard in southeastern San Francisco for seventeen years, and works in a relaxed way, but apparently ceaselessly, judging by his prolific production. Hersh commented in several interviews on what he calls his Daily Practice: “just show up, stay engaged with what you love, and keep going.”

In 2015, I curated a mini-retrospective of Hersh’s work at Stanford Art Spaces, entitled One Day at a Time: Thirty Years in the Studio. Hersh, on his early encaustic paintings of botanical motifs juxtaposed with geometry, synthesizing figure-ground opposites: “Real/imagined, natural/manmade, etc. “My premise is that there is no separation and that everything is nature itself.” Also shown were newer paintings made without paint brushes which carried his sensibility in the direction of experimentation and process: “Man-made versus natural prevailed, but changed imagery. It became mechanically assisted marks against paint pours controlled by natural forces; gravity and surface tension,” assisted by additional troweling, gouging, scraping and sanding. Hersh’s newest works, the ‘structural’ Skin Deep wall reliefs, begun in 2013, combined cutout birch plywood geometric shapes and wooden-grid scaffoldings, in which 2D painted shapes and the 3D support structures interweave in a complex ambiguity that recalls the spatial ambiguities of Analytic Cubism. These hybrid pieces defy categorization as either painting of sculpture; they’re philosophical questions (and solutions) that are both ambiguous and deeply intriguing and satisfying; they’re elegant perceptual mazes in which the eye goes on witty, surprising adventures.

In 2019, Hersh was the subject of a solo exhibition, Expanding Universe, at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame. In the curatorial statement, I wrote: Modernist art has been incorporating elements from the real

world for over a century, beginning with the printed cane-weave pattern paper and rope edging of Picasso’s 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning, and continuing with the hybrid art objects of Cubism, Dada, Surrealism and Pop. Renaissance illusionism in painting, prevalent in European painting for the previous five centuries, gave way to objects affixed to ambiguously painted —now-flat, now-spatial painting surfaces, initiating a conversation between illusory (painted) and real (found) objects, reflecting the speed and complexity of modern life…

Howard Hersh’s constructed paintings, on birch plywood panels affixed to unpainted basswood and poplar scaffolds or structures, continue this aesthetic and philosophical dialogue. Known for his lyrical abstractions in encaustic (wax-based) paint, Hersh, driven to deny illusionism and thereby complicate and enrich his work, moved, in 2012-3, from two into three—or two and a half—dimensions; he continues to explore this expanding universe in two complementary bodies of work, which he characterizes as “two means to an end.” Hersh: Dispositions of Structure and Axis Mundi are paintings about structure: the fabric of the universe as we know it, from invisible forms of energy pulsing through every atom to visible natural phenomena. And beyond physical structures, these paintings tackle the societal, political and intellectual structures we all must navigate. Skin Deep (acrylic on birch and basswood) developed from an inquiry into the nature of painting itself. “Specifically, I am questioning the notion that paintings exist as pictures of something—illusions—while sculptures exist on their own, as objects. Because I love making thing as well as paintings, I wanted to deconstruct painting and push this work closer to objecthood. The basswood wall structures of Skin Deep exert themselves as objects, encapsulating as well as supporting the paintings.”

They are of course more than objects: they are objects of art that straddle the 2D/3D frontier between illusionism and mute objecthood (to use critic Michael Fried’s term for Minimalism), never quite settling into one or the other. Harold Rosenberg’s term, “anxious objects,” coined to describe avant-garde work of questionable status as art, comes to mind, too, but Hersh’s pictorial/spatial conundrums are unquestionably paintings, and art—just art of a tantalizing ambiguity. The interplay of painted shapes and the engineered scaffolding (reminiscent of billboard and derrick structures) maintains a tension: being vs. becoming. As much deconstructed as constructed, the works seem suspended in time, yet implicitly open to change: four-dimensional, in a sense, like Cubist paintings, with their multiple views and perspectives: representations of the flux of time and self.

The nineteen paintings comprising the exhibition to structure/ a structure are representative works from five series of paintings. all of which are open-ended, i.e., bodies of work that Hersh sometimes returns to, having as yet not exhausted the ideas. (Hersh also enjoys the challenge of working on several pieces at once, even in different styles.) They are Axis Mundi, beginning in 2013; Skin Deep, beginning in 2014; Migration, beginning in 2018; Roundabout, beginning in 2020; and Timelines, beginning in 2022. The works are in general given titles indicating the year and the number of the work within that series during that year: Axis Mundi 17-1, for example, was the first of this series made in 2017.

Howard Hersh is an artist whose long and varied exploration of the synthesis of opposites has produced works of visual and intellectual delight that merge painting and sculpture. The works reflect the questing personality of their maker and pass the artist’s two aesthetic tests: they command the viewer’s attention; and, years from now, they will be as fresh and vivid—as alive—as if newly made.

Learning Curve, 61 x 61 x 7 inches

Skin Deep 17-16, 60 x 60 x 5 inches

Skin Deep 22-1, 60 x 60 x 5 inches

Timelines 23-9, 47 x 36 inches

Timelines 23-8, 44 x 32 inches

Migration 20-1, 60 x 49 x 8 inches

Disposition of Structure 17-3, 30 x 60 inches

Roundabout 21-1, 48 x 48 inches

Roundabout 21-5, 48 x 48 inches

Axis Mundi 20-3, 6 0 x 60 inches

Dispositions of Structure 17-7, 30 x 60 inches

Axis Mundi 17-1, 60 x 60 inches

Axis Mundi 19-2, 60 x 60 inches

Expanded Migration, 4 x 60 x 12 inches

Disposition of Structure 17-2, 32 x 36 inches

Structure/Shelter, 30 x 60 inches

Component 17-5, 3 6 x 36 inches

Dispositions of Structure 10, 40 x 39 inches

Dispositions of Structure 16, 40 x 39 inches

HOWARD HERSH CV

Born, 1948, Los Angeles, Ca.

Lives and works in San Francisco, Ca.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024 to structure/a structure, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA

2023 Timelines: A Painters Progress, Inclusions Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2021 Ruth’s Table, San Francisco, CA

2020 Holding Space, Avenue Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2019 Expanding Universe, Peninsula Museum of Art, Burlingame, CA

2018 Within/Without, Local Language, Oakland, CA

Duval Contemporary, San Francisco, CA

2017 Dispositions of Structure, Fourth Wall Gallery, Oakland, CA

2016 Modern Structures, Space Gallery, Denver, CO

2015 One Day at a Time, Stanford Art Spaces, Stanford University, CA

Two Means to an End, Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL

2013 In My Shoes, R&F Paints, Kingston, NY

NuArt Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (also 2010, 2008, 2006, 2004)

2012 Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL (also 2010, 2007)

2011 Gallery One, Nashville, TN (also 2007)

2009 Butters Gallery, Portland, OR (also 2007, 2005, 2003)

2008 Aliya/Linstrum Gallery, Atlanta, GA (also 2004)

2006 Susan Street Gallery, Salona Beach, CA

Andrea Schwartz Gallery, San Francisco, CA (also 2004, 2002, 2000)

2005 Gwenda Jay Addington Gallery, Chicago, IlL (also 2004, 2001, 1999, 1997)

2002 Bryant Street Gallery, Palo Alto, CA (also 2001)

1999 Jain Marunouchi Gallery, NYC

Deloney Newkirk Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (also 1998)

1998 Artworks, Hong Kong, China

1997 Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

1996 Eva Cohen Gallery, Chicago, IL

1995 Carole Behrman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Shidoni Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024 Black & White, Arc Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Salon at the Triton, Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA

2023 Beyond the Union of Opposites, Upstart Modern, Sausalito, CA

Verve/Summer Group Exhibition, SCAPE Gallery, Corona del Mar, CA

2022 Spring Group Show, G2 Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

Pallette Cleanser, Pallette Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2021 Structural Perspectives, Gebert Contemporary, Scottsdale, AZ

Origins in Perspective, Museum of Geometric and Madi Art, Dallas, TX

Building Bridges: Breaking Barriers, Ruth’s Table, San Francisco, CA

Covimetry, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT

2020 Grey/Gray Matters, Divisible Projects, Dayton, OH

The Blues, The Painting Center, NYC

Block Party, Brentwood Art Center, Los Angeles, CA

2019 Bauhaus, an Enduring Legacy, Ruth’s Table, San Francisco, CA

Wall Sculpture, Freud Monk Gallery, NYC

Bone Black, DZINE Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2018 Organic to Geometric, Provincetown Museum, Provincetown, MA

48 Pillars, Arc Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Fiction (with only daylight between us), Art Academy, Cincinnati, OH

Traveled to twelve venues since 2016

2017 Collateral Surfaces, Process Museum, Tucson, AZ

Drip and Dry, Slate Gallery, Oakland, CA

Mars, Alfa Gallery, Miami, Fl.

Along the Lines, Firehouse Art Center, Pleasanton, CA

2016 In the Details, Jamie Brooks Fine Art, Costa Mesa, CA

Length x Width x Depth, Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, AZ

The Salon Show, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA

2015 Organic to Geometric, Endicott, Beverly, MA

Four Squared, ARC Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Beyond the Plane, Space Gallery, Denvery, CO

2014 Second Time Around, Museum of the Shenendoah, Winchester, VA

Swept Away, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ

Subliminal, Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA

2013 The Elephant in the Room, Laconia Gallery, Boston, MA

MUSEUM, FOUNDATIONS, AND UNIVERSITY COLLECTIONS

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX

Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ

Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, Logan UT

Ashville Art Museum, Ashville, NC

Process Museum, Tucson, AZ

Museum of Geometric and Madi Art, Dallas, TX

Bernard Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

University of Florida, Gainsville, FL

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA

The David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Los Altos, CA

Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY

Center for Architecture+Sustainability+Art, San Miguel, MX

University of California, Davis, CA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, STANISLAUS

Dr. Britt Rios-Ellis, President

Dr. Richard Ogle, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

DEPARTMENT OF ART

Martin Azevedo, Associate Professor, Chair

Dean De Cocker, Professor

James Deitz, Lecturer

Daniel Edwards, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor

Dr. Alice Heeren, Assistant Professor

Chad Hunter, Lecturer

Dr. Carmen Robbin, Professor

Ellen Roehne, Lecturer

Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Associate Professor

Susan Stephenson, Associate Professor

Jake Weigel, Associate Professor

Mirabel Wigon, Assistant Professor

Alex Quinones, Instructional Tech II

Matt Hayes, Equipment Technician II

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES

Dean De Cocker, Director

Kory Twaddle, Gallery Assistant

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

Brad Peatross, Graphic Specialist II

Catalog photography courtesy of the artist and Lauren Segal studio (front and back cover photos).

Howard Hersh: to structure / a structure

August 19–October 11, 2024 | University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. This exhibition and catalog have been funded by Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus.