Reviews
The material’s fluid plasticity and her handworked shapes take over. Herbert’s sculptures resemble flexible coin purses, origami creatures, tarpaulins, air mattresses, car seats, crumpled napkins, towels and folded flags. Their myriad folds imply unfolding and mystery and the notion that if you could open them up, there would be something inside..
Ferdinand Protzman, The Washington Post
“In Mimi Herbert's sculpture the plastic sheet is the module of each work. It is heated and then pulled folded, twisted or rolled into shape. "...with this uncomplicated system, Herbert has managed to transform what we know to be a cold, hard substance into something soft, sensuous, visually satisfying, and absolutely irresistible to the touch."
JoAnn Lewis, The Washington Post
“It is an ingenuous sensibility one encounters here; there is no irony in the pizzaz of Glory #2 which has a grace in its movement that is somehow at once a kind of drawing and sculpture....The more ebullient flag pieces are akin to lyric poetry rather than to patriotic hymns, and the best of them undulate in a biomorphic rhythm which invigorates the poetic ambiguities...The etched pieces have the quality of a new made manuscript covered with palimpsest of an indecipherable script. Their edges glow (literally) and give further linear twist.
John Blee - The Georgetowner
“When I first came to your house the first thing I saw was that flag by Mimi Herbert. She did a major sculpture in fibreglass that covered the front of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. I had commissioned that work for the Bicentennial to hang outside the oldest art museum in the nation’s capitol. One of the first Detroit collectors that I met was a man who has a Mimi Herbert. It was like meeting old familiar friends.”
Roy Slade, former Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the catalog for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection.
“Strange vinyl shapes in lush colors feature the Mimi Herbert exhibit at the Henri Gallery. Constructed by laboriously heating vinyl sheets with sun lamps, then folding and refolding them into airy untrammeled shapes, the shiny sculptures invite the touch and yet at the same time inhibit it because of a certain virginal quality.”
Michael Kernan, The Washington Post
“Strange, surreal sculptures of real beauty are on view....their crumpled and dented surfaces should put one in mind of the wracked remnants of an automobile graveyard. But because the material is translucent been handled with care, the result is ethereal and elegant, and the uneven surfaces throw sliding patterns of light and shade over white walls that are subtle and beautiful.”
Meryle Secrest, The Washington Post.
“Her sensibility is somewhat lyric and touched with a rather distant sense of humor. The pieces are non-objective but informed with generalized associations with natural events........All the pieces in the show are formed from sheets of transparent plastic at their best the forms, organic and somewhat painterly in reference, exist on three formalistic levels. They reflect light in fascinating ways, and in this sense they are all surface, and yet they are strong enough in outline to exist as three dimensional objects. And they cast shadows which are an important part of the visual experience. The best pieces begin to live a life of their own that is beautiful and strange.”
Benjamin Forgey, The Evening Star
"------for the first time in Chattanooga, I found myself contemplating work so driven by inspiration and executed with world-class elan that at that moment the wall at 1401 Gallery became a window into the complexities of dynamic, imaginative vision full of realizations, intuitions, and excitement.
Michael Crumb, Chattanooga Pulse