We are pleased to present “Romantic Subtractions” Elana Herzog’s first book project. Herzog was invited by Gervais Jassaud of Generation Collectif to create a publication that combines the work of a poet and a visual artist in a book that Jassaud designs. There are 12 books and Herzog has made unique artwork for each.

The books are printed on Rives BFK paper, and the artwork is made with fabric scraps, metal staples, acrylic paint and handmade paper that she made while a resident at Dieu Donne papermill. The form of the book becomes the site to which Herzog responds – a long and meandering one, in which each surface has two sides. The process of stapling materials to the page creates a different but corresponding image on each side of it. The language of the poet Jerome Rothenberg is a source of endless visual and visceral associations.

Elana Herzog is best known for installations in which textiles are aggressively stapled to wall surfaces and then deconstructed to produce residual drawings consisting of shredded fabric and perforated gypsum in some areas, and densely stapled and built-up materials in others.   She lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by Lmak Projects. Herzog has recently exhibited Dewarped and Unweft, a survey of her work since 1993, at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri. She has had solo and two person exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, Smack Mellon in New York, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, in New York, Lmak Projects and PPOW Gallery, New York City, and Diverse Works in Texas, the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. Her work has been internationally exhibited at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland, in Sweden at Konsthalle Goteborg and at Konstahalle Gustavsbergs, and she has participated in various group shows.

Herzog is the recipient of the 2009 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the 2007 and 1999 NYFA Individual Artist’s Fellowship, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She was a 2008-2009 Workspace Resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Collectif Generation is an artists’ book project of Gervais Jassaud in which he pairs visual artists and poets. He has worked with the following artists, among many others: Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt, Jessica Stockholder, Amy Sillman, Jane Hammond, Katharina Grosse, Enrico Baj and Pablo Siquier.