Georg Herold (1947) - Nietenblatt

Georg Herold’s work belongs to a context that is central to understanding: the so‑called “Nietenblatt” as a deliberately positioned counterfigure to the auratic single artwork. Within the Tombola structure of the KJUBH, the classical value mechanism of the art world is overridden. The “Nothing” – the miss – takes on a form, a handwriting, an artistic stance. This shifts the expectation: the consolation prize becomes the actual object of desire.
Herold responds to this format with a remarkably precise strategy. The depiction – a reduced, linear drawing of a female body in a stretched, almost balletic pose – initially appears intimate and casual. The line is sparse, controlled, almost touchingly set. At the same time, a clear physical presence emerges. The figure is not elaborated, but suggested; precisely in that lies its tension. The mild erotic charge – visible, but not displayed – remains in a state of unfinished, sketch-like exposure.
Crucially, there is the second level: the technical framing. The offset lithography on self-adhesive paper consciously points to reproducibility, to distribution, to the opposite of the singular artwork. The side-visible gray bars and the technical labeling at the lower edge (“End Time… Separation Black”) clearly come from a printing or prepress process. It is the marking of a color separation – specifically the black plate. Thus, the production process is not hidden but laid bare.
This disclosure is not a side effect but constitutive. Herold integrates the language of technical reproduction into the image’s meaning. The drawing does not appear as an original gesture, but as a state already run through, reproduced, and processed. The reference to “Mies” in the print note is not accidental: it evokes modernity as a project of clarity and reduction – and is here translated into the context of a sober production log.
The tension arises exactly from this overlay: corporeality and technology, intimacy and reproduction, drawing and printing process. The self-adhesive carrier material amplifies this further. It makes the work potentially something transferrable, movable, almost functional – an image that could be not only viewed but also used.
The numbering 300/300 deliberately marks the end of the edition. In a system that already operates with equivalence, it is precisely the last number that acquires its own quality: not exclusive in the classical sense, but as the boundary point of the series.
Within Herold’s oeuvre, the work fits consistently. Since the 1980s he has been more interested in the conditions under which art is produced and circulated than in the autonomous art object itself. Language, material, context, and mode of production are equally meaningful. The “Nietenblatt” is an ideal vehicle for this: by definition marginal – and thereby becomes a precise site of artistic reflection.
The work thus operates on several levels at once: as drawing, as print product, as a commentary on the art world, and as an ironic revaluation of value and expectation. Its strength lies not in formal opulence, but in conceptual sharpness and in the controlled underselling of what is traditionally expected of a “work of art.”