For her Night Gallery debut, Katie Herzog reinterprets Gerard Richter’s “48 Portraits,” originally completed for the 1972 German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Transtextuality (SB 48) continues Richter’s study of the learned portrait, however instead of choosing white men of letters as Richter did, Herzog selects forty-eight transgender leaders in the fields of science, philosophy, and literature. In her title, Herzog also aligns her project with Senate Bill 48 signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2011 requiring the inclusion of trans individuals in school textbooks. Herzog’s project, utilizing images from Wikipedia and other online sources, addresses transgender representation in the public sphere and aligns painting with interactive digital archives to investigate an aesthetic realm of social epistemology and create a new public document. In the process, the term Men of Letters is critically engaged to open dialogue surrounding gender, language, and the intellectual body.
Katie Herzog received her MFA from UCSD in 2005 and her BA from RISD in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe at venues such as Actual Size (CA), Rugters University (NJ), Oxford University (UK), Los Cienegas Projects (CA), and Vox Populi (PN). Her work has been about in KCET Artbound, Book Arts Newsletter, LA Times, Daily Serving, and Sternberg Press.
