The 2024 exhibition season of Dep Art Out in Ceglie Messapica, the summer venue of Dep Art Gallery in Milan, opens with a show by German artist Gerold Miller. On Friday, July 12, 2024, from 6 PM to 9 PM, a special evening event will take place, during which a work created specifically and locally for the trullo spaces of Dep Art Out will be presented. The evening will feature a presentation by art critic Gianluca Ranzi.
Gerold Miller has created a work that ties his art to the land of Puglia. For its creation, a performance will take place a few days before the official exhibition: a tractor, symbolizing agricultural work and the fertility of the land, will ideally sow in a new substratum, that of art. Miller presents a new version of his „scratched surfaces,“ which he has created only a few times in his career. The marks left by dragging the work on the road and on the rich soil, ready to germinate, remain indelibly „impressed“ on the artwork.
The act of dragging etches the surface, much like our journey marks and enriches us, leaving indelible imprints in our memory. The performance will encapsulate some of the main themes of the German artist’s work: the dialogue his structures establish with the environment and the mysterious, one might say magical, power that color holds in his art. As a metaphor for life, Gerold Miller’s surfaces, usually as shiny as mirrors and ready to reflect every image (often „too fast and fleeting,“ says the artist), are marked by their passage along the road.
This is the first time Miller uses a colored work for this process. Orange like the color of the sunset, of the sunburned earth, but also the color of that tractor, an old Fiat, which is also a memory. Miller, who grew up in a farming family, reconnects with his childhood in this project, with a pure gaze that knows how to combine nature, art, and the environment.