Carpenters Workshop Gallery is proud to announce its latest collaboration with German artist, Roger Herman. The Los Angeles-based artist will exhibit for a solo show his collection of ceramic bowls and vases painted in bold, vivid colors, at the gallery’s London space.

Throughout Roger Herman’s career, there has been a focus on controversial themes of mortality and pornographic references in both his painting and ceramics, which has fascinated his fans. However, his exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery will showcase an alternative side of his ceramic works that experiment with color, another central aspect or the artist’s work, the artist himself saying that the subject of his work is always paint.

Roger Herman’s use of color is renowned in his recent work. Despite its characteristic arbitrariness, there is real mastery in the works that the artist creates, which brought him recognition as the West Coast king of the 80s neo-Expressionist movement. Control he had mastered in his painting on canvas was taken away from him when he began to use clay. The artist became fascinated by how the colors changed during the glazing process, which ironically gave him more freedom to enjoy the sensations of learning to be an artist in a different way.

Leaving Ace Gallery, where his paintings and woodcut prints had previously been showcased in 1998 allowed Roger Herman to take on a new artistic direction by choosing to work with clay alongside painting as a way to give his expression a new outlet.

A complete novice, Roger Herman turned to the tuition of one of his graduate students at UCLA, where he became a professor of fine art in the late 1980s, and began to devote his time to mastering this new craft, making 500 bowls in order to perfect his style.

Ceramic work has experienced a renaissance in the last 15 years, with artists no longer considering it a ‘lowerclass medium’, and appreciating its versatility as an artistic tool. Los Angeles and the West Coast of the US has been a key epicenter for this movement, with Roger Herman as a pioneer, particularly as he refers to himself as an artist rather than a ceramicist, someone who specializes in both painting and sculpture.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery which specializes in limited edition functional sculpture has long been a fan of Roger Herman’s work and sees vases and bowls as the ultimate functional sculpture, in fact the first, as it was invented by humans in order to hold food, and act as a survival tool but also decorated and formed in an artistic way for millennia.