Georg Herold

Georg Herold was born on 26 July 1947 in Jena, Germany. Before turning to art, he trained as a metalworker in Eisenach; exact dates are not confirmed in public sources, though the apprenticeship preceded his 1969 enrollment at Halle. He then studied at the Burg Giebichenstein art school in Halle from 1969 to 1973, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1974 to 1976, and at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, where his teachers included Sigmar Polke and Franz Erhard Walther. Sources give slightly different end dates for the Hamburg period, but all place his formal training across Halle, Munich, and Hamburg.

By the early 1980s Herold had settled in Cologne and developed the vocabulary that still defines his work: brick and wood-lath constructions that mimic the language of minimalist sculpture while using cheap, everyday building materials, and "caviar paintings," canvases studded with roe-like clusters that play on ideas of luxury and taste. He showed with Albert Oehlen and David Salle in a 1986 exhibition at the ICA London, part of a loosely associated circle of German painters and sculptors reacting against both American Pop and German Neo-Expressionism. His work entered major international surveys through the 1980s and 1990s, including Skulptur Projekte Munster in 1997, Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, and a two-person Projects exhibition with Markus Oehlen at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993.

Herold has held teaching posts alongside his studio practice, including a professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1999 to 2014 according to institutional CVs, though some sources describe the post as ongoing, and a further teaching role in Amsterdam. He continues to live and work in Cologne.

Critical attention to Herold has centered on his refusal to separate material from meaning: bricks, lath, and caviar are treated as loaded objects rather than neutral supports. Writing on the occasion of his 1993 Projects exhibition with Markus Oehlen at The Museum of Modern Art, curator Robert Storr addressed the deliberate structural instability of Herold's sculptural objects as central to their meaning rather than a flaw. Herold's inclusion in major surveys such as Documenta IX and repeated museum exhibitions across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands have cemented his place in the history of German art since the 1980s, even as his commercial market has stayed smaller than that of some contemporaries from the same circle.

The highest publicly documented auction price for a work by Georg Herold is EUR 87,000, including buyer's premium, paid for Caviar, a brick and caviar-clustered painting, at Grisebach's spring auction of German art of the 1970s and 1980s in Berlin. Grisebach's own press materials single out the work as a standout result within that sale category, though the exact calendar date of the sale is not stated in the auction house's public release. Other documented lots at Van Ham and Grisebach's autumn sales have cleared in the EUR 10,000 to 40,000 range, suggesting a market with real but modest depth and no confirmed result above EUR 87,000 in open sources as of this writing.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Georg Herold, so provenance and authentication rest on the artist's studio and his galleries, including Petzel, Capitain Petzel, and Galerie Barbel Grasslin. Public sources do not name a single exclusive current representative. His auction record is comparatively thin, with the current documented high of EUR 87,000 sitting well below the prices commanded by some peers from the same generation, and results for individual works can vary widely depending on medium, series, and moment of sale. Given the small number of public high-value sales, collectors should treat any single auction result as an indicative data point rather than a stable benchmark, and confirm currency and date details directly with the selling house before relying on them.