LONDON.- Los Angeles-based artist Roger Herman returns to London for a solo show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery titled Untitled, presenting 19 new ceramic works alongside a selection of his large-scale paintings from 22 May – 28 June 2019.

Untitled showcases Roger Herman’s practice over the last 40 years working at the nexus of art and design, featuring his large hand-crafted ceramic vessels alongside 3 paintings and four one-of-a-kind bespoke books with original paintings. Taking a similar intuitive approach when working with both mediums, Herman’s paintings and ceramics respond to each other in the space through their colourful abstract design and vibrant expression.

Herman comments: “This exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery is a continuation of my work and a chance to showcase both aspects of my practice, with the ceramic works corresponding to the paintings. The interesting part of making ceramics for me is that you can’t control the process as much as with painting. In the ceramics the element of surprise and the unknown is important. Painting is control, ceramic for me is letting go of that control.”

Born in Germany before relocating to LA, Herman began his career creating paintings of phenomenal proportion and was christened as the West Coast parallel of the eighties neoExpressionist movement, before he began working in clay. His painterly beginnings remain apparent in his approach, as he treats each pot as a blank canvas on which he layers brush strokes, using dashes, lines and splodges to build texture as well as colour. Fascinated by the way that the firing and glazing processes affect the colour, Herman has found freedom in this medium.

A teacher at UCLA since the 1980s, a fertile ground for the city’s artistic community, Herman shifted to ceramics after taking lessons from one of his students where he cast some 500 pots whilst perfecting his technique. His ceramic practice takes inspiration from the human body, with some figurative in nature, featuring drawings of women engaged in sexual acts in the style of Japanese erotic prints, while others veer more towards abstraction in form and design.

Herman has exhibited his work in galleries across the world and is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). His work has featured at fairs such at Frieze New York, Design Miami, and Art Los Angeles Art Contemporary. He has also participated in numerous group shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Ludwig, Saarlouis, Germany, and the Art Museum of São Paulo, Brazil among others.