Gabriele Herzog is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her first Australian solo exhibition, Drive Baby, presents both large and small-scale abstract paintings. The gestural quality of Herzog’s work lies somewhere between the calligraphic and the cartoonish. Slow and considered, yet inherently playful, these works command the space that they inhabit with a carefree, whimsical confidence.
In her larger pieces, Herzog's signature bold, graphic line work sits in playful conversation with more washy, diluted brush-strokes. Her use of bright and sunny colours is made powerful against the modest neutrality of raw canvas. Her smaller works may be diminutive in scale, but they dominate their surroundings with densely packed oil pastel forms rendered in black, blue, orange and silver.
Gabriele Herzog makes paintings that are at once playful, poignant and powerful.
