Turbulence is Life Force: Frank Herrmann’s Paintings (1976–2025) celebrates nearly five decades of work by Professor Emeritus Frank Herrmann. Known for his fascination with movement, Herrmann explores the chaotic energy of waterways, flames, and natural forms through dynamic motifs like spirals and zigzags.
Spanning from early "history paintings" to recent explorations of tree portraits and Asmat shields, the exhibition highlights Herrmann’s evolving approach to abstract painting. Using vivid colors, layered textures, and innovative techniques, Herrmann captures both turbulence and serenity, embodying life's unpredictable energy. His art stands as a testament to the enduring struggle and beauty found within constant movement and change.
“Turbulence is Life Force: Frank Herrmann’s Paintings (1976-2025)”
Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, Frank Herrmann (b. 1945), who taught there from 1973- 2014, has had a long-standing influence on the region’s artists. One theme running through his art these past five decades is movement, especially turbulent flow which pervades his waterways, flames, and dynamic motifs such as zigzags, waves, and spirals. Even his paintings of isolated trees address movement, since their survival rests on water flowing below. Moreover, his attraction to the Asmat Tribe, which began in 2001, can be attributed to their being comprised of hundreds of villages spread across a tidal jungle roughly the size of New Jersey, situated on a vast network of rivers flowing into the Arafura Sea.
This exhibition’s earliest painting, Glendora Marks (1976), a “history painting” of sorts, chronicles the floor of UC’s then brand-new Glendora Avenue studios splattered in paint soon after the painters got to work. Herrmann was struck by how quickly the floor became a painting all its own, which sheds light on the notion of paintings as maps, a perspective prevalent in the abstract painting Untitled (1982), which proffers a “flyover view.” For this painting, a hallmark of that era’s Pattern and Decoration Movement, Herrmann attached canvas to a painted sheet of plastic. After releasing the canvas with the painted surface from the plastic, he continued painting on the cast-paint surface.
Since 2018, Herrmann has painted over a dozen “tree paintings,” portraits of lone, barren trees floating amidst barely visible, hand-painted haikus, whose deciphering process recalls Wheel of Fortune. The haiku embedded in Tree Trunk: Haiku-4 (The Dubrovnik Tree) (2020-2022) says, “Disorient space/ What obscuring shroud is this/ Cloaks the massiveness.” Framed by Werkstätte stained-glass, this ancient greying tree, whose limbs grasp at the heavens like willowy arms begging for a reprieve, blocks a photograph of a glorious gallery scene. Part of his “Conflagration” series, Herrmann’s latest painting Conflagration-5 (2025) was inspired by fire, yet flames, no differently than water, propagate in turbulent and laminar flow fields.
Exemplary of the confusion, cacophony, and drama typical of a busy road, Geez’s Valise: Journey Forms (1993) revisits the traveler’s dilemma, such that adventures arise from forks in the road. In memory of his uncle, Herrmann collaged elements of his uncle’s worn-out valise atop its surface. Although three paintings here share a dangling teardrop, each drop evokes a different item. For example, the drop in Buoyant-12 (Chrysalis & Shafts) (2017) depicts a chrysalis attached to a branch sticking out of a stream, whose languorous ripples resemble imagery adorning Asmat shields. By contrast, Buoyant-14 (2017) proposes a massive droplet hovering above a waterway, whose turbulent ripples were made by laser-cutting cotton twill in the form of curlicues. The reds in Buoyant-2 (2016) suggest a hot spot such as a boiling river, lava flows, or a lunar eclipse.
To make Asmat Specimen (2004), whose core imagery is a vertical Asmat war shield, Herrmann directly transferred the shield’s symmetrical imagery to the canvas by rubbing the canvas over it. Carved by wowipits (master carvers) in a ritual setting known as the jeu (the men’s ceremonial house), Asmat shields are placed near doorways to protect homes from evil spirits and to interface between the living and the dead. After studying 300 Asmat shields in 1972, Ad Boeren “proposed that the interconnectedness and mirror images on the shields represent the cyclical nature of Asmat headhunting, whereby the younger generation seeks revenge for the preceding generation’s death” (Smidt 1993, 53), which explains their evocations of turbulence. According to Audrey Ricke, “the Asmat conceive of a universe divided into three parts: the living, the intermediate, and safan, the place in the west where the ancestors dwell” (Smidt 1996, 51).
Herrmann’s painting Guardians of Safan (After Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret) (2010-2024) pays homage to both Asmat culture and Pollock’s 1943 painting, which owes more to surrealist automatism and petroglyphs than Native American art. Like Pollock’s painting, Herrmann’s painting is flanked by two figures, however, the central imagery features a war shield and the curlicues and spirals typical of such shields. The seated man on the left is typical of Asmat bisj poles, whereas the full-length Asmat body mask on the right references the wood, fiber, leaves, and paint masks worn by performers personifying the recently deceased during mask feasts.
The last four paintings epitomize three decades of abstract painting. Gardening of Orders (1989) and Tendril, Ligament, & Form (1998) are exemplary of turbulence, whereas Big Four Field-1 (1989), which seems rather lyrical, and Scraper (1999) convey the smoother, more predictable laminar flow. Herrmann’s turbulent paintings feature jarring colors and dynamic waves, zigzags, and spirals painted in splintered brushstrokes. No doubt, turbulence represents the struggle for life.___Sue Spaid, PhD
References
Smidt, Dirk. “Wowipits: The Asmat Woodcarver.“ In Asmat Art: Woodcarvings of Southwest New Guinea, edited by Dirk Smidt. George Braziller Inc., 1993.
Smidt, Dirk. “Asmat: Art and Life Out of Death.” In The Object as Mediator: On the Transcendental Meaning of Art in Traditional Cultures, edited by Mireille Holsbeke and Gerard Rooijakkers. Etnografisch Museum, 1996.
