Viewing Room: Carmen Herrera (Cuba, 1915 - 2022): March 2023

1 - 31 March 2023

Carmen Herrera in front of the Cerro de la Silla in what is now downtown Monterrey, Mexico, en route to her honeymoon in Acapulco, 1939.

Artists
From Havana to New York, via Paris
1915 - 2022
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. She moved frequently between France and Cuba throughout the 1930s and 1940s; having started studying architecture at the Universidad de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (1938-39), she trained at the Art Students League, New York, NY, USA (1942-43), before exhibiting five times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1949-53).

Herrera settled in New York in 1954, where she lived and worked until her death in 2022.
Herrera's work was the subject of a large-scale survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2017)

A drive for simplicity

Core to Carmen Herrera's (1915 - 2022) painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour: "My quest", she said, "is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions" (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera created symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint.

As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi.
Herrera in 2016

A cross-cultural dialogue with modernist abstraction

Herrera's work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she said:

"I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn't essential" (2005).

While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera's body of work established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.
Available works
- Carmen Herrera, Untitled NRW, 2017
- Carmen Herrera, Verde y Rojo (Green & Red), 2019
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Viewing Room: Carmen Herrera (Cuba, 1915 - 2022): March 2023

From Havana to New York, via Paris

A drive for simplicity

A cross-cultural dialogue with modernist abstraction

Available works

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