Carmen Herrera

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About Carmen Herrera

Cuban artist Carmen Herrera was born in 1915. She moved frequently between France and her homeland in Cuba throughout the 1930s and 40s, before finally settling in New York in 1954.

Cuban artist Carmen Herrera was born in 1915. She moved frequently between France and her homeland in Cuba throughout the 1930s and 40s, before finally settling in New York in 1954. Despite the visionary nature of her work and association with artists of great reputation, including Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, Herrera’s paintings were the subject of few exhibitions, until a large-scale survey at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2009. This story of neglect was familiar to many women artists of her generation who emerged during the post-war years. Herrera’s work is characterised with reference to the lineage of modernist abstraction, particularly Latin American nonrepresentational concrete painting, thus establishing a cross-cultural dialogue within this international tradition. The journey of Herrera’s enduring commitment to abstraction can be traced from a kind of romanticism that informed her work of the 1940s, through to a shift made in 1950. Subsequently she has consistently refined her focus on space and colour, paint characteristically applied in flat, solid areas. Works are organised based on the harmony and tension of opposing chromatic planes, combining symmetry and asymmetry as a means to give structure to the surface. At the heart of Herrera’s work is a striking formal simplicity and attention to colour. Devoid of any referential aspects, her paintings combine line, form and space to convey an intense physicality.

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