Introduction
In this conversation, Gerold Miller reflects on the origins of his practice, the conceptual rigor behind his minimalist approach, and the evolving dialogue between space, form, and perception in his work. From childhood experiments with found paintings to his radical departure from traditional artistic education, Miller traces his journey as an artist committed to distilling visual language into its most essential elements. He speaks on the influence of Baroque architecture, the interplay between past and present in his work, and the tension between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. Addressing the role of the viewer, unrealized projects, and the future of abstraction, this interview offers rare insight into Miller’s artistic philosophy—where every work is both a resolved image and an open question.
On Beginnings and Influences
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What was your first memory of art?
To understand early influences. Was it an image, a place, an object? How did it shape your understanding of form and space?
When I was a boy of ten years, I found some conventional oil-paintings in the cellar of my parents' house. I made a small installation in our garden, changed the original signature with mine, and sold them as my paintings to our neighbors.
At that time this was a very serious thing to me, and it still is. Until today, I take my role as a producer of images in society very earnest, and I am still enacting it without wanting to add something „new” or taking the intellectual ownership of an image into consideration.
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Was there a particular moment when you decided to become an artist, or was it an accumulation of experiences?
How did this realization come to you—was it gradual, or was there a defining point?
I knew already as a child that I wanted to be an artist, there was no alternative for me. I grew up in a rural area where there was no real art scene, so I had no specific idea of what it meant to be an artist. That's why I had to invent myself.
This also applies to the radical break I made during my art studies. I realised that I had to make a new start, with myself, with my thoughts and actions. So I rejected everything I had learned so far. This was especially true considering the basic figurative course that every student had to attend in the first year at the Stuttgart Academy. I started by casting a corner of our class room in plaster and placed it as a sculpture in the room. As I said, at that time I generally had a negative attitude towards anything that was predetermined or institutionalised, which meant that I had to make my way relatively alone at first, but from today's perspective this only strengthened me.
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Which artists, architects, or thinkers outside of visual art have influenced you the most?
Your work has clear intersections with Minimalism, Constructivism, and Concrete Art, but what about influences beyond art—music, science, philosophy?
The area where I grew up is strongly characterised by the Baroque period and its churches and monasteries. That's also how I developed my understanding of art: Baroque master builders were rarely just architects, but also sculptors and painters. Their concept of a „Gesamtkunstwerk“, the fusion of architecture, sculpture and painting, the combination of real space and spatial illusion, the world as a stage became the basis of my artistic development, which still occupies me today.
On Process and Time
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What role does time play in your work?
Your set series engages with balance and instability, while the Instant Vision works evoke a sense of compression. Are you interested in capturing a fixed moment, or is the work in a dialogue with time?
My works function like sceenshots or snapshots of the present, hence of my time.
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Do you see your work as an unfinished conversation?
The idea of incompleteness—are your works ever “finished” or do they remain in flux conceptually?
There are groups of works, like instant vision or set, that I thought everything had been said about them, that they were finished. But then they suddenly reappear in an updated, modernized form in my head. There is nothing final, everything is always in motion. No statement is fixed, everything comes back when you turn around the next corner. In that sense, you can call them unfinished conversations.
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If you could add another dimension to your work—be it sound, movement, or another medium— what would it be?
Would you ever consider expanding your practice beyond sculpture and painting into installation or digital interventions?
There is only what I do. If I was interested in something else, then I would do it.
On Perception and Space
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How do you define the role of the viewer in your work?
Minimal and geometric works often invite active participation. Do you see your pieces as self-contained objects, or do they need the presence of a viewer to complete them?
The viewer as an active-critical agent plays an important role in my artistic investigations. Located in the here and now, my works unite the spatial level of contemporary art with the temporal level of past, present and future to create a structure in which the viewer is at the centre as his own protagonist.
I never wanted to make a ‘painting’ or a ‘sculpture’ in the traditional sense, but rather their preconditions: unformed sculptural space and projection surfaces for images, both in constant transformation. By putting these components up for discussion, I subject my work to a conceptual expansion in which the ‚image result’ must be created by the viewer himself.
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Your works seem to oscillate between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. Do you consider them more as paintings, sculptures, or as something entirely different?
The frame, the edge, and the void are all key components of your work—how do you conceptualize them in relation to space?
Exactly as you say. An essential element of my artistic work is space in whatever form. I am concerned with space, with dimension, pictures, sculptures and reliefs. I studied sculpture and therefore I see and think spatially.
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Is there an ideal environment for your works to be experienced?
Would you want your work to exist outside of gallery walls—integrated into architecture, public spaces, or even virtual spaces?
My work is anchored in reality, committed to the present and seeks interaction with the surrounding space, the viewers. I do little in public spaces. At the moment I am realising a sculpture in Corten steel in a public space for Centuripe (Sicily). The city is on a hill with several slopes, one of which is currently being refurbished as a park, where the sculpture will then be set up facing the volcano Etna. I see this as the ideal setting for my sculpture because it contains everything: a heroic landscape, a vast sky and, within sight, the defining symbol of the island, the dramatic, fire-breathing Etna, the most powerful and active volcano in Europe to this day.
On the Archive and Future Visions
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If you could have a conversation with any artist, living or dead, who would it be and why?
Would it be someone from Minimalism, Russian Constructivism, or a completely unexpected discipline?
Especially in the 60s and 70s there were many designers and artists in Italy who consciously worked hard on the border between art and design, such as Ettore Sottsass, Agostino Bonalumi, or Gianni Piacentini etc.. I would have loved to talk to them about the art scene back then and how they came up with their timeless and radical visual forms.
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Do you keep an archive of unrealized projects? If so, can you share one?
The idea of the “unrealized project” —what is something you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t yet been able to?
In 2002 Peter Halley, Franz Erhard Walter and I developed together a project for the foyer of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, but unfortunately it was never realised because they got a new director at that very moment.
Peter Halley was very important to me in the 90s as a conceptual-minimalist painter. I have known Franz Erhard Walter since the mid-80s; his conceptual-sculptural exploration of the body was extremely influential for me.
We developed an installative form of spatial collage in which each of us brought his own personal artistic approach and each of us reacted to the other. That was very exciting. I still have all the ideas and sketches in my studio archive.
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What does the future of abstraction look like?
Your works are deeply connected to the industrial era, production techniques, and material precision. How do you see abstraction evolving in the next 50 years, particularly with digital and AI-driven aesthetics?
I think that Minimal Art will have a more conceptual impact, and I hope that it will have a more direct impact on our lives.
Closing Questions
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What is a question you’ve never been asked but wish you were?
I have never been asked exactly this question.
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What would you like your last work to be?
If you could envision your final piece—your ultimate statement—what would it look like? Would it be an object, an idea, an absence?
That would certainly be a black work, just as it all began. It should be very simple and beautiful at the same time.
Interview conducted on the date of 3rd of February 2025
Interviewer: Louis Buysse from Buysse Gallery
Interviewee: Gerold Miller
