Golden Rut: Work by Alexander Herzog & Justin Witte

After completing 4 years of making his hand-gesture painting series, Alexander Herzog has moved to the scab paintings series. With analogue and digital tools, elements of the hand-gesture paintings are cut out and digested in a new space. Elements that were once dense with action, line and color, are re-figured into a space where they are abbreviated, fragmented, and patchy, like scabs on a body after a trauma.

Justin Witte’s materially saturated works in Golden Rut were all developed from cropped compositions taken from comic books published between 1987 and 1993. The built up surfaces of the paintings and Witte’s use of different substrates behind the work pushes and pulls at the edges of the picture plane and plays with the space between the painting as image and the painting as object.

Alexander Herzog lives and works in Chicago IL. His work has been exhibited at the The Suburban, Oak Park, IL, The Poor Farm, Manawa, WI, Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, “Why did the Chicken Cross the Road”, New Haven, CT, and Lloyd Dobler in Chicago among others.

Justin Witte is an artist, and arts organizer in Chicago. He has a basement studio, and ground floor house that contains two daughters and one fellow artist.

Roots & Culture would like to specially thank Sonnenzimmer for the design of PR materials.