Gerold Miller »total object 358«

total object 358, 2024

Gerold Miller is trying to formulate a broadened concept of pictorial quality with his work group total object, which is not clearly to define neither as painting nor as object: it is frameless and functions as a frame equally. The frontal orientation of total object accords with current visual culture’s tendencies towards perfect surfaces. The aubergine-coloured wall sculpture can be interpreted in various ways, it functions as a ‘zero’ as well as a purely aesthetic form. Thus total object reformulates a paradox typical of the art of the 1960s, when reduction and excess, anti-illusionism and illusionism became opposite poles in dealing with the picture, at the zenith of Minimal and Pop Art.

Gerold Miller

The minimalist form defines the works of the German object artist Gerold Miller (*1961, Altshausen). His wall objects achieve their impact through radical monochrome and geometric abstraction. 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.

The viewer as a critical entity and active participant has always been playing an important role in Gerold Miller's practice. He never offered a ‘painting’ or a ‘sculpture’ in the traditional sense. Instead, the premise upon which his work is based is a yet to be formed sculptural space that is working as a projection surface for images. The actual image-finding is left to the viewer.

The enactment of art as place and reality plays a vital role in the artist’s oeuvre. It is about the viewer’s perspective on him- or herself and how he or she locates him- or herself in space in relation to it. The fusing of artwork and viewer becomes an ever-new process and makes simultaneity an essential factor. Gerold Miller succeeds in uniting space and time, standstill and movement, viewer and work in one work of art.

Read our studio story with Gerold Miller.