Marie Herwald Hermann: compound and bridges

In the Project Room:

Marie Herwald Hermann: 

compound and bridges

March 13 - April 19, 2025

Broadway is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Marie Herwald Hermann in the Project Room. Living between Copenhagen and Chicago, Hermann works primarily in clay, engaging the wall, floor and bespoke shelving as strategies for presentation. 

Like a more emotional, sensual iteration of Allan McCollum’s celebrated Plaster Surrogates, Hermann’s diminutive, thrown and hand-built vessels are formally idealized expressions of tender tactility. Her gentle bowls evoke the simple gesture of cupped hands, and her freestanding vase-forms a more substantial, personified presence. 

Hermann’s more complex configurations of objects begin to suggest a theater’s mise-en-scene in miniature. A concise circle of flat tinted glass hangs flush to the wall above a delicate shelf-perched cup, or, elsewhere, a ropy length of hand-carved cherry wood supports a dangling slab of silicone draped elegantly across a composition. The result is a triangulation in the relationship of object, space and audience.

This careful, totalizing approach to presentation is reinforced by the artist’s subtler interventions into the gallery space as a whole engaging the existing architecture as a component of the installation. This is also signaled via a carefully selected color scheme for the walls (selected to evoke the non-color of joint compound) that serves as accent and foil to the artworks’ starring roles.