Artist: Oliver Herring

Born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964, Herring's early work consisted of woven sculptures and performance pieces, recorded through photography, video, or stop motion. His most recent work however consists of sculptures carved in foam and covered in hundreds of photograph cutouts. His process is best described through his quotes:

"When you look at these sculptures, you don't really get how they're put together. You might conceptually understand that they're made from photographs, but you don't really get the in-between stages. There are two separate mediums here: the Styrofoam structure, and the added photographs. They constantly struggle against each other."

"In these photographic pieces, I'm working with a person for two or three months, and that leaves a huge margin for things to happen and change. The person changes- things happen- and change gets incorporated into the piece. I take thousands of photographs. It feels very deconstructive. Then I try to bring it back together again, and that's the restructuring process."

These works represent an incredible approach to the sort of image collage processes that I use, portraying the images 3-dimensionally in sculptural form rather than digitally. The fact that he shoots the models over the course of a few months is also interesting, seemingly forming a more accurate representation of a person rather than the way they might have looked on one certain day in a particular lighting setup.



http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=90