Gerold Miller

hard:edged 29, 2001

The title hard:edged adapts the name of a 1960s movement within Minimal Art painting. The name ‘Hard Edge,’ coined by Jules Langser in 1958, relates to artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Al Held, who sought extreme formal economy, perfect application of paint and full luminosity of color in their painting. The inner structure of the work is intended to be freed from all links with the outside world and to become the actual object of the art. Another step led to shifting painting into three dimensions with Frank Stella’s shaped canvas, which caused painterly quality to retreat behind the possibility of illustrating progressive, three-dimensional changes of form. For the hard:edged group, Miller adopted the characteristic agreement of color and pictorial outline, the ‘color as shape,’ that creates close links between color, shape and space. The extent of the color is identical with the extent of its support, and in a series, each color has a part to play within the whole system.