Whitehot Magazine

Athens Greece Based Painter Harm Gerdes Talks to Noah Becker About Literal Magic and Painting with Special Colors

Artist Harm Gerdes at his Athens Greece studio with one of his works.


By NOAH BECKER August 8, 2024

Noah Becker: I met you in Athens when I was in Greece for the George Condo show at Dakis Joannou's DESTE Foundation, did I meet you at the Breeder Gallery? We had a good time visiting your studio the next day too...

Harm Gerdes: It was at the Breeder Gallery where you were with your friend and advising editor Carson, at the opening of the Maria Joannou show. Yeah. And then we got to talk...

Noah Becker: Carson met you and your friend first, then I was introduced. Right. And I found out that you are a painter, and I visited your studio and saw your work. And you're currently showing with the prestigious international gallery Peres Projects?

Harm Gerdes: That's correct. Yes.

Noah Becker: Peres Projects has multiple locations?

Harm Gerdes: Yeah, Peres Projects actually is American, and Nick as well, his partner who runs the gallery, and Javier started out in San Francisco and LA, I think. And then he moved to Berlin, and now they are in Berlin, in Korea, and in Milan. I've shown in all three locations now with them.

Noah Becker: Right. And do you have another show coming up there?

Harm Gerdes: I had just closed one actually two months ago in Milan, and now I'm discussing other projects, but it's still in the phase where you don't talk about it.

Noah Becker: Right, of course. And what about Athens? Talk just quickly about your history, like where you're from?

Harm Gerdes: My father is German, and my mother is from Cyprus. Cyprus is a small island. It's like an individual country, but they're speaking Greek. They're very close to Greek culture and everything. So I grew up speaking Greek with my mother and right after COVID, I was still living in my small hometown near Frankfurt.  I already started working with Peres, I decided that I wanted to move, and I decided that I wanted to move somewhere where I could speak Greek. This was in order to connect more with my maternal side...
 

Studio view, Athens, Greece.
 

Noah Becker: I see. Let's talk about your work a little bit. Tell me what inspires it.

Harm Gerdes: My work is very abstract, but I think you can call it kind of an abstract figurative type of painting, because everything is very precise. I have here some very loose sketches that I do on Japanese paper. And these doodles, I scan them. I work a lot with Procreate, and I kind of refine the whole image until I start actually painting. So there's a lot of composition going on, but at the same time, it's a very free and intuitive approach to work.

Noah Becker: Where do you get your inspiration for the colors? You use a lot of green and things that could be almost like natural colors.

Harm Gerdes: Yeah, the colors. The colours as well as the first, let's say, sketches are also very intuitive. So if I look at works of mine that I did three years ago, I would barely use any green. And for some reason now, I started, in some recent works, using quite a lot of green. Greece is very bright, there's a lot of sun the whole time. So my colors got sort of more vivid, more bright, in a sense. And if I look at my German works, they're a lot more muted, the colors, and maybe darken somehow. And then I have some very splashy elements, like flashy or pure colours within that work. But now everything, my colors got a little bit more light. They got kind of a bit more natural, I would say...
 

Studio view
 

Noah Becker: Yeah, right. Not too decorative, but kind of almost forest-like or something?

Harm Gerdes: Yeah, no. I always try to balance that because I work with an airbrush as well, in order to not have this graffiti connotation. If I do a green painting, you will see some purple shading into it. And graffiti, let's say, has this very loud monochrome kind of thing, or pieces of color coming together. You can think about tones, tonalities. So there's this musical element of harmonies and disruptions. This is the way I think about color. It gives the painting a certain sound.

Noah Becker: What is a common question that people ask you when they look at your work?

Harm Gerdes: People always ask how it's made. Nobody understands how it's made because the technique that I'm using is very unique. I kind of invented it on my own. People don't understand that it's a canvas that they're seeing because the surface is very flat and they always think it's a kind of panel. And then if they look at the elements, you get that there's some airbrush involved because that's something you are more familiar with. And then with this pour technique that I'm using, that I had also had shown you in the studio, this is something that nobody understands. They just get that something is there, which is made differently because you have these pieces on the canvas that stick out.

Noah Becker: Almost sculptural and painterly at the same time.

Harm Gerdes: Yeah.

Noah Becker: You ever make things that are just sculptures?

Harm Gerdes: No, I don't do. I only paint right now. In my studies I also did some sculptural things, but right now I'm just focused on paintings because also I figured out you have the possibility of the illusion in the painterly space, and I feel like that's already enough, and there's so much to do just on the canvas.
 

Studio view, Athens, Greece.
 

Noah Becker: Yeah, it's a challenge to get the kind of surface that you want, when you're making work, because the surface really dictates the result in a certain way. And people that don't do a lot of painting don't really understand. So when you say you invented something, how can you describe this invention?

Harm Gerdes: One thing is important to know is that I didn't say, "I want to invent something new." It happened through a couple of coincidences that led me to this. And one thing to know is that I used to paint with oils. If you paint with oils and you go to acrylics, you hate it because of the yellow, you need to paint 50 layers of yellow. And I had to change colors because I got allergic to turpentine, and turpentine is included in every oil paint you can buy. So it was like, okay, I will use acrylics. There is nothing of that stuff in there - but what else can I do with the colors if I'm not using the brush?

So actually through the works of Tauba Auerbach, you know her? She also uses some of that pouring medium with acrylics. Actually her works, I found very beautiful and that made me kind of more into it as a technique that I could maybe work with as well. So I bought some of that pouring stuff. You can see tons of these videos on wherever, where they're doing these flip cup things, and then you just pour it on the small canvas. You tilt it ect.
 

Studio view, Athens, Greece.
 

Noah Becker: Are you talking about liquid glass?

Harm Gerdes: No, I'm talking about acrylic pouring medium. If you type in acrylic pouring and YouTube, Reels, whatever, you'll see like thousands of videos where people go, they put colour, let's say in a cup, three colours each after each, and then they flip that stuff. And because the color is not melting, you have these beautiful effects on that canvas. So it's very easy to create something kind of pleasing, but then to actually do something very nice with it is very hard because the material is hard to tame.

Tauba Auerbach does very beautiful works with this material. They're older ones of hers, I think they're like 10 years old or something. And I started to work with it as well. And then I got a sense for the material, and then I figured out that I could use a kind of wire that I would stick on the surface, and I knew that from sculpting. So now what I'm doing is I'm kind of sticking these kind of wires on a canvas that act basically like the drawing, the forms that I want to create. I pour the acrylic in these, and then after some point when it's a little bit dry, when it wouldn't move that much anymore, like after some hours, I take these wires off and it kind of melds into itself, but the forms stay.
 

Studio view, Athens, Greece.
 

Noah Becker: So it's magic.

Harm Gerdes: It's literally magic.

Noah Becker: Okay. So I know you can't talk about what's coming up, but is there anything you can kind of say is coming up or say to watch out for?

Harm Gerdes: Yeah, I mean, I am likely to show for the first time in Greece, some of my work next year, and I'm very excited about that right now.

Noah Becker: Well, great talking to you. I have to run, but we'll be in touch later today.

Harm Gerdes: Yeah. It was my pleasure.

Noah Becker: Take it easy. WM

Noah Becker

Noah Becker is an artist and the publisher and founding editor of Whitehot Magazine. He shows his paintings internationally at museums and galleries. Becker also plays jazz saxophone. Becker's writing has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Garage, Art in America, Interview Magazine, Canadian Art and the Huffington Post. He has written texts for major artist monographs published by Rizzoli and Hatje Cantz. Becker directed the New York art documentary New York is Now (2010). Becker's new album of original music "Mode For Noah" was released in 2023. 

 

Links:
Noah Becker on Instagram

Noah Becker Paintings

Noah Becker Music

Email: noah@whitehotmagazine.com

view all articles from this author