Elana Herzog

Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.

Herzog's installations blur distinctions between two-and three-dimensional media, eliciting comparisons to late-modernist painting and drawing, yet they also upend that tradition through a subversive, deconstructive process that emphasizes ephemerality and fragility. Artcritical editor David Brody writes of that process: "Herzog's ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions—unruly brushstrokes, in effect—that coalesce into powerful storms of texture." Thematically, Herzog's conversion of household castoffs into minimalist art raises questions about value, ownership and high- and low-culture conventions of taste and beauty; Review Magazine describes her work as a "conceptual, emotional, and gutsy" alternative to most fiber art, which leaves viewers to conjecture on associations between women, fiber and gender stereotypes, the destructive capacities of the creative process, and the layering of history. Elana Herzog, Valence, wood, drywall, paint, textile, metal staples, steel shelving posts, hardware, 20' x 30' x 4', 2014. Installation, The Boiler (Pierogi), Brooklyn, NY.

Education and career Herzog was born in 1954 in Toronto, Canada. She studied art at Bennington College (BA, 1977) and Alfred State College (Masters of Fine Arts, 1979). In the 1980s, she worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, including electrician's apprentice, mechanic and construction worker, while producing mixed-media sculpture out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She withheld from exhibiting until 1990, when she participated in a group show at Minor Injury Gallery (Brooklyn) and received a review mention from Roberta Smith in The New York Times.

After turning to textile-based works in the 1990s, Herzog attracted growing attention with several site-specific installations, group shows at White Columns, Hofstra University and the Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at Black + Herron, Momenta Art, and P.P.O.W. In the 2000s, she installed stapled-textile works at venues including SculptureCenter, Smack Mellon, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Drawing Center; Her work bears the formal influence—often irreverently—of minimalists Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, and site-specific conceptualists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well more narrative-based sources, such as Freud and Magritte.

Early sculptural works and installations In her early career, Herzog aggressively reconfigured found linens, shower curtains, rugs, drapery and lace, smocking, puckering, cutting and stretching them into minimal sculptures. This work alluded to the body, gender and women's undergarments, nature, cleanliness and privacy.

Elana Herzog, Civilization and Its DisContents, Persian and Persian-type carpets, mixed fabrics and media, and metal staples, dimensions variable, 2003/5. Installation views at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY. Left: close-up view.

Stapled textile works In 1999, Herzog began embedding found textiles in walls, movable panels and built surfaces using thousands of heavy-gauge metal staples that often re-inscribed selected patterns in the material. She then deconstructed them through a process of shredding, pulling and cutting; the remaining fragments maintained the rectangular formats of her sources in ghostly, afterimage-like forms that dissolve distinctions between figure and ground.

Herzog first exhibited this work in shows at the Kohler Arts Center and GAGA ("Projected") in 2000. Her GAGA exhibition featured six sections of a shredded red bedspread embedded in panels that she integrated with gallery walls to suggest pieces created in situ, rather than modular units. For Into The Fray, Herzog mounted sections of stapled textiles on fiberboard on to freestanding metal shelving struts, found wood, and walls throughout the space, rendering armature and art indistinguishable;

In two large installations, Herzog explored history as a cycle of resurrection and collapse, and rationality spiraling into entropy. In 2018, she recreated Valence at the Rubin Foundation's 8th Floor Gallery in a 10'-high version inhabiting a corner in the gallery; writers likened it to intimate, peeling layers of civilization evoking aerial views and underlying structures of urban planning, power relations and global change.

For two international exhibitions, Scale Shifts; Vision Adjusts (2016, Sharjah Museum, UAE) and "Material Migrations" (2017, Artisterium 10, Tbilisi, Georgia), Herzog collected carpets from New York and each show's locale, from which she created largely horizontal works that reference the global movement of culture and allude to (and upend) the Modernist grid and aesthetic.

Paper works and books Herzog began working in handmade paper after a residency at the Dieu Donné Papermill in Manhattan (2008–9) suggested similarities between paper production and her own processes of deconstruction and reconstitution. In 2009, she was invited by the publisher Gervais Jaussad to produce an edition of twelve unique artist books pairing her work with poetry by Jerome Rothenberg. She created a second book edition in 2012, Texas, with poetry by Monica de la Torre.

Herzog first foregrounded her works on paper in the show "Plumb Pulp" (2014) at LMAK Projects, which featured books and pieces framed and pressed between glass and backing board that conjoin textile fragments and wet paper pulp into a single substance. She has been a visiting artist, lecturer or instructor at Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt Institute, New York University, The New School, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Between 2012 and 2016, Herzog lectured at Yale University.