“The Third Mind”

Recent exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo have made it their task to reveal marginalized or undervalued historical figures. Ugo Rondinone’s selection of thirty-one artists for his exhibition “The Third Mind” continued this program of rediscovery, mingling contemporary and historic works in a series of visual dialogues made by groupings of works.

Of the thirteen such conversations comprising the exhibition, several stood out. The proto-Minimalist artist Ronald Bladen was described by James Meyer in this magazine in 1999 as a “somewhat obscure figure”—this certainly remains the case in Europe. His

print February 2008

Georg Herold

New to Georg Herold’s sculpture are the five oversize figures that dominate this one-room display of his work. Constructed from canvas stretched and stitched over lengths of timber, and sprayed with glossy car-body paint, they appear caught in some epic, spastic struggle with an invisible enemy. These ungainly antiheroes, generically titled Figur I–V, 2007, have enabled Herold to create a dramatic staging of the handful of earlier works also on display. One, for example, points accusingly at Künstlerische Medizin, Patho-Ontologie (Cabinet patho-psychologique), 1995, a makeshift vitrine containing