XTOONE was a major exhibition installation by Georg Herold at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. To accomodate this exhibition Herold decided to bring an earlier effort to create an artists lexicon to a - sort of - conclusion. A book was made in which 3 separate narrative lines were included on every page. The ’top story’ consisted of a collection of works which told the story of his art in a not necessary chronological order. The ’centre stage’ was taken by Herold’s lexicon; a system of meaning and wordplay which is an ongoing effort. The ’bottom line’ represented a series of essays on the artist’s work. A system of reference connected the three different story lines which made the book a hermetic experience.

In the late 1970s Herold studied with Sigmar Polke and soon after became associated with a wave of radical young German artists including Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger. His work reflected an anti-bourgeois rebelliousness and appropriated building materials and caviar alike as the vehicles for his artistic expression. The lack of a single unifying principle, material or interpretative, is one of the consistent aspects of Herold’s work. Whether presenting a simple plank of wood on a wall or an abstract portrait made out of numbered fish eggs, he prefers to leave the viewer to ponder on his mysterious visual propositions, their meaning half-familiar, half-alien.

Herold’s work plays with our expectations of what it is we are seeing, what art is, or should be, and with the artist’s role in making meaning and challenging the viewer. ’I intend to reach a state that is ambiguous and allows all sorts of interpretations’, he has declared. The artist’s ironic, pop-tinged humour is an irresistible part of the process. (Saatchi Gallery)