LMAKprojects is pleased to present Elana Herzog’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Into the Fray, for which she will make a new site–specific installation. Into the Fray responds to the space of the gallery and encompasses the viewer within its sculptural environment.

At LMAKprojects Herzog will engage the entire gallery as she applies her signature use of staples and cloth to its walls and to free standing constructions. Into the Fray makes use of two dimensional and three dimensional elements to move the viewer’s eye from surface to structure, reinterpreting and questioning the traditional role of the armature in painting and sculpture. Her use of the expression “The withering away of the support” playfully confuses the words of Karl Marx with those of comparably dogmatic Modernist critic Clement Greenberg.

Elana Herzog’s work addresses the personal and the social through material and form, coaxing the sublime from the most mundane of materials and methods. By creating works in which beauty plays a somewhat subversive role, she challenges the viewer to engage with content and to consider their personal relationship to it. Herzog has always been interested in the social history of “making,” and in the idea that technology is something that exists in a continuum that begins with the human body and extends into the as yet unforeseen. Her recent imagery traverses the language of abstract art, and that of warp and weft. Increasingly her work reflects Herzog’s growing desire to understand the intrinsic relationship between Modernism and the legacy of industrial and technological progress that permeates contemporary culture.

Herzog lives and works in New York City. Dewarped and Unweft, a survey of her work since 1993, was at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri in 2009, and is accompanied by a catalogue and an interview with Regine Basha. Herzog has had numerous solo and two person exhibitions including ones at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland, among other venues, and she has participated in many group shows in the United States, including at the Drawing Center in New York City, the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, and at the Weatherspoon Museum, in Greensboro, North Carolina.