George Herms: Hot Set

George Herms: Hot Set featured forty-four works of sculpture, collage, and assemblage by this celebrated artist made between 1959 and 2005, selected by legendary curator Walter Hopps. Hopps, who first met Herms in 1956, one year before he opened the legendary Ferus Gallery, placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Keinholz. Included early on in the ground-breaking exhibition The Art of Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, Herms continued to work across disciplines, using poetry, film, theatre, and assemblage as his mediums, as well as starting the LOVE Press in the early 1960s. Herms was a member of the West Coast Beat movement, and credits Wallace Berman with teaching him that any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly. This ability to reclaim, recycle, and recreate found objects remains central to Herms's work, from his first secret show in a deserted area in Hermosa Beach to the present. Hot Set featured a range of his celebratory and elegiac work, enlivened by Hopps's lyrical and idiosyncratic installation.

George Herms: Hot Set
Kurator: Walter Hopps