Georg Herold, "compu.comp.virtual visualities.equivacs.bitmapdyes"
September 10, 1998 - October 31, 1998
Brooke Alexander Editions
59 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012
I reviewed this show for Artforum and always thought it defined an excellent midpoint between slightly insouciant gallery art and slightly insouciant computer art. Wooden pixels twisting and turning in space. Color picker dialogues as paintings. Mirrors as screens. Handsome and clunky--what's not to love? This was during Herold's "down" period between Luhring and Petzel but a few people were paying attention. It was much-reviewed and is some of his best work, I think. (Brooke Alexander has the exhibition title wrong on its web page, making the cyber doggerel even worse: "virtual visualities *bitmat dye *equivac")
Here's what my review said in part:
...Stripes of concentrated watercolor on large sheets of photographic paper recalled the palettes of digital tool bars (or their low-tech cousins, paint samples from Home Depot), and strings of suspended wood blocks floating a foot in front of the wall made erratic, looping arcs, like a novice's pixelated MacPaint scribbles gone three-dimensional.
These trappings of digital display remind us that the Internet, touted as a hypermodern realm of infinite freedom, is ultimately linked to the individual user through a set of graphic conventions as regimented as a Skinner box and as dated as a game of Space Invaders. [...]
This was just as the dot com (or dot comp) era was getting good and revved up. The exhibition photos look very "today" to me.