Anne Herzog “L´île Infernale”

Studio Vendome

[Image: Anne Herzog "Snaeffelsnes" (2016) Ink on paper, 50 x 33cm.]

This event has ended.

“Yes it’s a magic show! I’m doing my art work outside on the lava desert of the volcanic area of Snaeffelsnes.”

Magic, alchemy, the forces of the Universe and the forces of Nature, combine in this new body of work by French artist Anne Herzog to create a mythical, mystical experience for the viewer. Herzog works in film, photography, painting and drawing. Often working in a modest format, the two paintings in the current exhibition stand out as an anomaly, and yet contain the elements of her more common, smaller, ink drawings on paper. Made of wax, metal, acrylic paint and ink on canvas, these abstract paintings reflect the environment in which they were made; rough, elemental, mineral based, volcanic. White like the snow, silvery like the sky, black like the lava earth on which she paints, the paintings draw the viewer into this particular part of the world, and this particular region in Iceland called Snaefellsnes.

Herzog has worked on and studied the mysterious and legendary volcanic mountain Snaefellsnes for many years. Almost haunting the region, the artist has been there since 2009 filming the mountain and the people who inhabit the region, documenting the geological features, the stories and their lives on film and photography. Almost as if conjured up from the air, the entities that inhabit her drawings also seem to come from the center of the volcanic core of the earth. Some of them are a hot red earthy color, devilish, impish and mischievous; almost looking like to touch the surface of the drawing they would burn the hand.

Delicate would not be a word to describe these fine figures, but delicate indeed is the composition of these works. The wizard or witch, the naked girls, the fabled landscape in which these characters inhabit, remind one of outsider artists like Henry Darger, for whom art was almost an automatic process, derived from an unknown source of inspiration, almost coming from a place of dreams, of fantasy and nightmarish complexity. The simplicity of the composition and the characters belie the psychological weight of what these works suggest.
Yes they may have emerged from the inferno of the earth’s core, or perhaps have come down from the pure white sky of heaven, but they all ended up on the magic island, Iceland. The viewer follows these beings on their journey from or to (we are not quite sure) the center of the earth and the drawings become a visual report on the adventure, a personal diary of the artist recorded in symbols and imagery that are at once personal and yet universal.

Herzog was born in Cherbourg in 1984 and graduated from the University Panthéon Sorbonne in Cinéma Research. Her essay project was the movie Stromboli of Roberto Rossellini, showing the relationship between volcanoes and the sacred and began a new project about artists working on sacred and profane islands, the fascination for symmetrical destruction on islands like in Manhattan, Stromboli or Honshu. Herzog has an MFA from the Art School of Nantes and a Masters of Multimedia Studies from the University Esthua in Angers.

Herzog has been shown in museums and galleries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. She lives in Iceland where she has a residency art space in a giant old deserted factory and lives part time in France.