Since his beginnings as an artist, the viewer as a critical entity and active participant has been playing an important role in Gerold Miller's artistic research. He never offered a ‘painting’ or a ‘sculpture’ in the traditional sense. Instead, the premise upon which his work is based is such: as-yet-unformed sculptural space and projection surfaces for images. In submitting these parameters to examination, his oeuvre is subjected to a conceptual expansion where the 'image' has to be created by the recipient himself. This aspect of active involvement contradicts the usual theory of the image which defines it as a static object.
Gerold Miller explores visual issues in a border zone that accommodates sculpture, framed surfaces, and sculpturally and visually defined architecture. Using minimal means, his works attempt to discover where sculptural space ends and space for the painted image begins. Oscillating between image, relief, sculpture, and architecture, they cannot be unequivocally assigned to any traditional genre.
By treating forms and colors as objects, Miller attempts to systematize the fragmented character of our visual culture and then reintegrate it in the shape of individual elements. His works counter the dispersion of images and impressions by putting them in parenthesis, focusing on visually unoccupied territories in the midst of complex urban reality.
The notion of art as space and presence plays a significant role in Gerold Miller's oeuvre. He addresses the viewer's perspective on himself in relation to his surroundings and how he locates himself in this environment. The conjunction of artwork and viewer is a recurring process and renders simultaneity in a sense of projection and integration as a central factor. In Miller's work, we can experience the world simultaneously as simulated and real while we can move through virtual and physical space. Space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, viewer and work merge into one unified artwork.
Gerold Miller was born in 1961 in Altshausen. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Pistoia.
Miller’s works are currently on view in the group exhibitions “Reine Formsache. Konstruktiv-konkrete Kunst aus der Sammlung” at Kunsthalle Weishaupt in Ulm, and “something new, something old, something desired” at Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Previously, Miller’s works have been exhibited and collected by museums and private collections worldwide, including Nationalgalerie, Berlin, DE | Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæ, DK | Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, DE | NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art, US | Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, DE | Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg, DE | Hamburger Kunsthalle, DE | Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, DE | Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, IL | Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, AR | Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, AT | Museum Ostwall im Dortmunder U, DE | Kunsthalle Winterthur, CH | Takasaki Museum of Art, JP | Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, FR | Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, DE | Opera City Gallery, Tokyo, JP | Kunsthaus Bregenz, AT | Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, TR | Daimler AG, Stuttgart/Berlin, DE | Musée de l’Art et de la Histoire Neuchâtel, FR | Museo d‘Arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, IT | Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch/Stuttgart, DE | Rozenblum Foundation, Buenos Aires, AR Sammlung Schauwerk Sindelfingen, DE | Société Générale, Paris, FR.
