Carmen Herrera

Biography

Born in 1915 in Havana, Cuba, and passed away in 2022 in New York City, the United States of America, Carmen Herrera is a contemporary artist best known for her abstract wall objects hovering between sculpture and painting, and her monumental aluminum sculptures called ‘Estructuras’ or ‘structures.’ Associated with Minimal Art, Op Art, and Hard Edge painting, Hererra only received significant international recognition during the new millennium’s first decade.

Carmen Herrera takes on color and minimal shapes and brings them together in serene wall objects. These colorful, hard-edged geometric fields create a link between the Western art movements mentioned above and modernist South American art movements. She aims to achieve formal simplicity with a striking sense of color in a quest for the simplest of pictorial resolutions during her creative process.

The Cuban artist is 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.” (Text courtesy Lisson Gallery)

The artist views her development as an artist as a lifelong process of purification, taking everything away that isn’t essential. Carmen Herrera had a connection with Latin American non-representational concrete paintings, but also with her peers from the United States; think of Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland. She moved between France and Cuba before settling in New York in the 1950s—but only half a century later, her work found traction in the US, resulting in an explosive rise during the so-called autumn of her career.

Career Facts

Carmen Herrera studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in the late 1930s. In New York City, she trained at the Art Students League in 1942 before having her first notable exhibition in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her breakthrough would arrive around 2009, culminating in a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, which traveled to Ohio and Düsseldorf, Germany.

Carmen Herrera is represented by the industry-leading mega-gallery Lisson Gallery. She has had exhibitions at significant institutions, encompassing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; the Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain in Paris, France; and the Phoenix Museum of Art, the United States of America, among others.

She is being collected by the world’s most important institutions and public collections, encompassing the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, United States of America; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the United States of America; the Tate Collection in London, the United Kingdom; the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates; and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, the United States of America.

Books on Carmen Herrera

For further reading, we highly recommend the following monographic printed publications:

• Dane Miller, Carmen Herrera: Estructuras. Lisson Gallery: 2021.
• Nigel Prince, Carmen Herrera: Paintings in Process. Lisson Gallery: 2023.
• Dana Miller et al. Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Whitney Museum of American Art: 2016.

Artworks

Last Updated on January 2, 2024