Mythology has a special place in Siegfried Herz's work, intertwining through his paintings, drawings and photographs like the submerged river Lethé, laden with the fates of countless men and women, generations of suffering and hardship, searching and losing. Herz, however, does not see the mythological stories as uncommitted stories from a time long gone, but they are for him an open book to which he adds his own experiences and dreams. His works are thus entirely contemporary, showing the constancy and sameness of human emotions, which are not subject to time or the vain illusions of progress.
Otto M.Urban
Mythology has a special place in Siegfried Herz's work, intertwining through his paintings, drawings and photographs like the submerged river Lethé, laden with the fates of countless men and women, generations of suffering and hardship, searching and losing. Herz, however, does not see the mythological stories as uncommitted stories from a time long gone, but they are for him an open book to which he adds his own experiences and dreams. His works are thus entirely contemporary, showing the constancy and sameness of human emotions, which are not subject to time or the vain illusions of progress.
Otto M.Urban
Herz is a sensitive observer and a distinctive interpreter of secretly experienced ups and downs. Despite this apparent detachment, however, he also enters into the action personally and invites the viewer to do the same. To pause and concentrate, to possible harmony. The presence of the author in the work is thus quite essential in Siegfried Herz's work, it is open and intimate, it is even cruelly honest. It is also reminiscent of the words of the poet Karel Hlaváček, who wrote in his review of the exhibition of the painter Anna Costenoble, The Tragedy of a Woman, which took place in the Topič Salon in Prague in 1896:
"(...) it was not a cold brain that painted here, it was a highly excited soul that painted here, a psychic, vaporous essence spilled out into the wetness of the colours (...) Every mental impact, every exclamation immediately seeks its colourful expression."