Dmitri Hertz at Super Dutchess

Artist: Dmitri Hertz

Exhibition title: Crabapple

Curated by: Wangui Maina and Mo Kong

Venue: Super Dutchess, New York, US

Date: February 22 – March 25, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Super Dutchess, New York

Simplification provides clarity for understanding. Minimizing, reducing, and returning to our collective foundations is the starting point used to make sense of things that unfold beyond our immediate bodies. Precarity breeds a longing for simplicity, a longing to return back to nature. The mysteries of how life forms are created, evolve, and mutate are more understood than ever before, but an inescapable gap continues to exist between the human ability to process these findings and connecting them to the movements of everyday life. What if the solution was to Be more present in the biology unfolding around us?

Super Dutchess now presents Crabapple, featuring the works of Dmitri Hertz. Hertz combines his sense of wonder at the environments we inhabit with a persistent, pensive rigor in understanding it at the most basic level. Through physical gestures that mimic biological growth cycles and formations, Hertz calls into question our perceptions of “the natural” versus the engineered. Layer by layer, with the methodical patience of cells forming layers in a snail shell, abstract ideas become concrete, relatable objects. Disregarding conventions of representational scale, microscopic elements are enlarged to almost cartoonish proportions, and the scale of objects becomes skewed.

Dmitri Hertz (b. 1986, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York City. He has had solo and two person exhibitions at Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, 2019) Lighthouse Works Gallery (Fischer’s Island, NY), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Know More Games (Brooklyn, 2015.) His work has been included in group exhibitions at Soloway (Brooklyn) Rachel Uffner Gallery (NYC), Murray Guy (NYC) and Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn, NY). Hertz was a 2016 recipient of the Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. He received a BFA from Cooper Union (2009) and MFA in sculpture from Bard (2014).