PINKNEY HERBERT | Vital Signs

Pinkney Herbert VITAL SIGNS

Inspired and activated by place and music, Pinkney Herbert is known for expressive abstract paintings and pastel works on paper comprised of dynamic gestures and multi-dimensional forms in sharp color.

VITAL SIGNS, Herbert’s newest body of work, shares the artist’s response to personal loss. He states, “my intention has been to leave sorrow and despair at the studio door and allow hope and vitality to enter into these paintings.”

Exploration and movement between New York and Memphis shaped the core of his 40-year practice. Maintaining studios in both cities, he absorbs sights, sounds, and energies of place and transforms them into deliberate marks with precise layering.

Herbert creates mesmerizing works on paper with graffiti-like brushstrokes and optical illusions, while his works on panel feature planes of color and digital imagery. Using a quick line to clear away space for concentrated swaths of color, his paintings are responsive and abrupt with moments of care, thoughtfulness, and intentionality throughout.

Known for electric color choices, Herbert has toned down his compositions and tightened gestural strokes. This go round he opts for black and white color palettes for a series of paintings appropriately titled Gotham and saves select color for his Vital Signs works and paintings in memoriam.

Pinkney Herbert was born in Charlotte, NC received his BA from Rhodes College and his MFA from the University of Memphis. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and USIA-Arts America and has exhibited throughout the US, Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia. His work is in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and the Arkansas Arts Center, among others. He is also the founding director of Marshall Arts, an alternative gallery, performance, and studio space he established in Memphis in 1992.

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