This wall-mounted folded acrylic sculpture situates Herbert’s practice within several intertwined postwar artistic lineages. Emerging from the mid-20th-century embrace of plastics as a modern sculptural material, the work extends a tradition that began in the decades following World War II, when industrial synthetics migrated from manufacturing and military use into the studio. Herbert treats acrylic not as a neutral surface, but as a sculptural substance, heated, bent, and contoured into dimensional form, asserting plastic’s place in contemporary material vocabulary.
By incorporating the motif of the American flag, the piece enters a separate but equally charged artistic dialogue. Rather than presenting the flag as a straightforward emblem, Herbert folds its red, white, and blue bands into shifting planes, echoing and complicating a lineage that runs from Jasper Johns onward artists who have used the flag as both symbol and subject, questioning how national identity, is constructed, repeated, and reinterpreted.
Installed on the wall, the sculpture occupies a hybrid space between object and image. It recalls the shaped canvases and reliefs of the 1960s and 70s, when artists pushed beyond the flat picture plane to assert the artwork as a physical presence. Here, the folds create alternating planes of reflection, shadow, and color bleed, activating the wall as part of the composition. The result is a work that engages history, of material, of symbol, and of form, while insisting on the viewer’s encounter with a sculptural object that is both icon and inquiry.
