Karen Herold (b. 1960) combines painting, drawing, and sculpture to create a scientific language of abstraction. Her works feature rich, embedded topographies that explore how environment, science, and genetics influence the natural world. A degree in chemistry fuels her search for the underlying patterns within complex systems, and her compositions often contain standardized symbols of chemical reactions, molecular biology diagrams, genetic pedigrees and illustrations of immunogenetics. The western blots, graphs of quantitative results and strands of genetic code coil and unspool onto the surface, offering a loose aesthetic structure highlighting that most tense and pervasive commingling of chaos and control.

Herold’s approach to the surface of the painting is incongruous, both creation and erasure are embraced. She considers the angle of the picture plane, the absorbency and tension of the support, and the mixture of the substances in building each composition. Traditional painterly processes and rhythmic, gestural brushstrokes conspire in unforeseen ways with sculptural materials like dirt, cement, and paper. Layers accumulate and textures fold and overlap, revealing clues to the picture’s making. Herold then selectively covers her tracks to obscure what has come before, concealing earlier marks with a trace of paint, pencil, charcoal, crayon, or sanding machine. Natural laws of gravity set the parameters of which elements are affected by mass and which remain static but each successive choice and gesture serves as an integral tool in her complex and nuanced sculptural approach. By converging her mutual desires to build and to tear down, she accepts their necessary entanglement and allows improvisation to guide her toward an unexpected, and intuitive resolution.

Herold has had solo shows at Gallery Airy, Yamashiro, Japan; Kaus Australis, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Vine Gallery, Los Angeles, California; and Advocate Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Her work has been included in group shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, California, PRJCTLA, Los Angeles, California, Bristol Art Museum, Bristol, Rhode Island, K Space Contemporary, Corpus Christie, Texas, Patricia Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Post Gallery, San Francisco. She has attended residencies in Japan, Italy and Holland, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

With a background in chemistry and medical research, my work over the last forty years has emerged with reference to the twinned histories of scientific imagery and organic abstraction. Interested in how the environment, scientific phenomena, and genetics influence the natural world, I investigate themes of change, gesture, and inheritance through my studio process. I combine painting, drawing, and sculpture to achieve thick surfaces built through coatings of paper, gesso, and paint. I used to take pages from science magazines with symbols of chemical reactions, molecular biology diagrams, and illustrations of immunogenetics, but I now only use newspaper. Each layer acts upon the last and suggests what might come next, whether further collage elements, paint marks—sometimes recognizable and sometimes asemic—or elements of erasure (e.g., sanding). As the compositions emerge, I am looking for underlying patterns within complex systems.

My earliest oil paintings collaborated with gravity and this alliance carries forward to my recent pieces, where paint runs down the surface unimpeded. My work in the 2000s imaged natural forms differently. I incorporated a single strand of DNA as a template, which I repeated and built up throughout successive paintings. These paintings celebrate an imposed order through tightly coiled forms and repetitive contours of borders and shapes that spread from edge to edge. I have experimented since then with denser fields of energy that pulse out from central reservoirs, thinking about the complex signaling and adaptive aesthetics of cellular structures: disjointed lines and unraveled loops suggest epigenetic mutations and look toward science for grounding. Since 2022, I have more openly embraced elements of chance. The paintings are unplanned but discovered in the act of making them.

I no longer incorporate scientific formulas and symbols; rather I let the organization of material happen from within. I see the dysregulation that comes from the confrontation with chaos, and the deeply human but ultimately futile desire to control it, as central to my current work. Working within given organizational parameters, I am responsive to which elements are affected by mass and which remain static, allowing my developing intuition to guide me. I am enjoying the confusion of scale these new pieces achieve, with abutting and exploding circles that suggest a space of the infinitesimal and the infinite. I recognize the ceaselessness of motion and the inevitability of energy to change form, making for states of provisional resolution. Repetition with variation is a mechanism of evolution and the long history of painting. Making the dynamic visible, I move on to the next painting and try again.