NEW YORK, NY.- Lisson Gallery presents new paintings on paper by Carmen Herrera as the second exhibition in the newest location at 138 Tenth Avenue in New York. The exhibition features eleven works, all painted within the past six years.
Drawing lies at the core of Herrera’s practice, wherein she uses arithmetic guidelines and careful calculations on tracing paper to create a meticulous framework. Expressed through basic geometric shapes, Herrera seeks to create a balanced relationship between compositional variables. Realized in a striking opposition of symmetrical or asymmetrical form, these preparatory structures are then translated on to larger paper and the chosen colors applied within the determined planes.
In recent works, Herrera continues to introduce novel juxtapositions of forms and line, while further exploring the role of color in her work. Over the past few years, Herrera has focused on primary colors, along with green, orange, and especially black. Often Herrera has made use of a single color against the raw white paper to create special tension, but in many of the works on view, Herrera fills each of the dimensions with acrylic paint to create bold geometrical structures.
To coincide with the exhibition of new works on paper, Lisson Gallery will present early paintings by the artist from her time in Paris in the late 1940s at TEFAF New York (May 4 – 8, 2017). Herrera’s paintings were recently the subject of a large-scale survey, Lines of Sight at The Whitney Museum of American Art (September 2016 – January 2017), which traveled to The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (February – April 2017).
Formal lucidity and a striking sense of color are central to the work of Carmen Herrera. “My quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions”, she stated in 2012. A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. Her art, which combines painting with sculptural volume, is allied to Latin American concrete painting, but in developing a pure geometric abstraction Herrera has established a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of Modernism. In the post-war years in Paris she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of abstract artists; while her work also chimed with painters from the US school such as Ellsworth Kelly and Mark Rothko, as well as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, both of whom were among her closest friends of the time. Reflecting on this period, she says, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential.”
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. After studying architecture at the Universidad de La Habana, Cuba (1938–39), she trained at the Art Students League, New York (1941–43), living in New York for the next decade before moving to Paris between 1949 and 1953, where she exhibited four times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She settled in New York in 1954, where she continues to live and work. She has had solo exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2009), Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany (2010), El Museo del Barrio, New York (1998) and The Alternative Museum, New York (1984). Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Collection, London; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2016 she was awarded the College Art Association’s Award for Distinction and at their 2017 Gala in May, El Museo del Barrio will celebrate Herrera with a Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award.
