Anne Hieronymus

Anne Hieronymus: Envisioning the Particular

Anne Hieronymus is a highly accomplished artist, working in several fields, whose work is a mixture of very specific details and, just as important, a slightly macabre mood that lends itself to a very contemporary reading of art and culture. Her collaged drawings attract an audience startled by the artist’s ability to raise detail to a high level of creativity. As an inward-looking person now active in mid-career, Hieronymus shows us how particulars of small dimensions can be seemingly jumbled together, only to make sense as her audience pulls away from a close reading to appreciate the overall gestalt, which functions thoroughly effectively as a complete object. The same is true of her sculptures, usually made from small, found, decorations--inexpensive holiday objects. The ersatz, while clearly visible in Hieronymus’s art, is transformed into a statement of vision that is much larger, technically and spiritually, than the parts of the whole. This means that the artist, in a modest but striking fashion, is reworking materials usually considered detritus but which are actually given new life as components in art--and, as Hieronymus has pointed out, will outlast all of us, either as components of her art or in the landfills.

This sort of thinking has a history to it. Hieronymus’s excellent drawings and collages make use of typeface letters, schematic designs, and tiny blotches--just about anything and everything--that tend to extend from a central nexus and occupy a slightly alarmed, distinctive center. The imagery then branches out, toward the edges of the composition. The general effect is highly interesting: objects of considerable integrity arise, composed of synthetic imagery. By behaving as an eccentric type compositor, Hieronymus gives herself the freedom to construct design drawings that feel nearly readable in their high intelligence--although it is clear from the start that these drawings and collages look like whirling alphabets whose main pleasure has to do with visibility rather than legibility. You can see it in Retype #3, a marvelous conglomeration of black abstract designs that form a larger design over the greater part of a circle shaped by bits and parts of color, many of them green. Toward the bottom there are circular abstract designs, which tend to reiterate the central circle mentioned above. It is all a controlled pandemonium, with a good deal of humor thrown in. The other drawings are similar--they too engage the viewer with small designs and stickers that complicate an overall pattern that is pleasing to the eye.

If we could come up with a term for Hieronymus’s two-dimensional art, we might name it celestial embroidery--a phrase that describes her sense of the otherworldly, as well as her fine sense of detail. But this is not in any way a revision of traditionally women’s work; instead, it is an extension of modernism, using the graphic device of typefaces and small abstract images printed by a rubber stamp. As a form of visionary print design and collaged patterns, the works succeed marvelously well. The sculptures, which differ in presentation from the abstract to a recognizable giraffe, make use of cardboard, which Hieronymus cuts so that she can fashion the shape she wants. In Giraffe, she has built a tall backbone, dense at the bottom with small parts but rising upward, simplifying as it goes--to the point where it is taken over by empty space. The work is charming, but also deeply sculptural--it gives us both the sense of a beautifully developed abstract work of art and a representation of a charming creature, equally charmingly brought into creative existence. Vessel operates much the same way; it is clearly a vase-like receptacle of some sort, but its walls consist of fake flowers and other artificial forms that seem best destined for the garbage heap.

Yet Hieronymus translates, and transforms, these throwaway items into something real. Her imitation berries and buds, jammed closely together on the surface of the vessel, look absurd when confronted singly, but within their group, and given their participation in a surface dense with made-up things, they lose some of their highly imitative energies by yielding, quite literally, to the big picture. The care and precision with which Hieronymus addresses these parts--even as she places them in thrall to the larger composition they contribute to--allows her to contend with large questions, such as the relations between what is synthetic and what is real, what is the part and what is the whole, and what is figurative and what is abstract. These are major questions in art, and are best elaborated on by words. But these issues are raised with high intelligence in the artist’s production. Although Hieronymus’s art does not address, in a literal sense, these issues, yet at the same time her images are composed with intelligence, playfulness, and skill--in ways that keep the questions alive. It is a good way of introducing her audience to concepts that at first seem dialectically opposed but which, over time, may be considered as existing on opposite sides of a gap that is smaller than we first assumed. The artist does so by building works that can be seen simultaneously as exemplary of both points of view--something we can only thank Hieronymus for.

Jonathan Goodman