Artists Research: Carmen Herrera.
Carmen Herrera is a Cuban-American Abstract and Minimalist Painter. She has lived in New York City since the mid- 1950s and her abstract works have brought her international recognition late on in her life.
Core to Carmen Herrera's painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour. A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates pieces of symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across her canvases.
Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight
Sept 16, 2016–Jan 9, 2017
Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight is the first museum exhibition of this ground breaking artist in New York City in nearly two decades. Focusing on the years 1948 to 1978, the period during which Herrera developed her signature style, the show features more than fifty works, including paintings, three-dimensional works, and works on paper. It begins with the formative period following World War II, when Herrera lived in Paris and experimented with different modes of abstraction before establishing the visual language that she would explore with great nuance for the succeeding five decades. Many of these works have never been displayed before in a museum.
The second section of the show is an unprecedented gathering of works from what Herrera considers her most important series, Blanco y Verde (1959–1971). Nine paintings from this series illustrate the highly innovative way in which Herrera conceptualized her paintings as objects, using the physical structure of the canvas as a compositional tool and integrating the surrounding environment.
With work dating from approximately 1962 to 1978, the final section illuminates Herrera’s continued experimentation with figure/ground relationships and highlights the architectural underpinnings of many of her compositions. This section includes four wooden sculptures—Herrera’s “estructuras”—as well as her brilliant Days of the Week, a series of seven vivid paintings.
Throughout my own personal project looking into Abstraction, I have been closely looking into artists' that communicate and use similar visual elements that I'm keen to show within my own work. Carmen Herrera's work has been especially influential in terms of colour, line and use of space.
An aspect that I've noticed within her work and have tried to replicate in my own practice through the process of using Vinyl Tape, is Herrera's use of directional line and symmetry. The way in which she uses line as a technique to break up the canvas and create areas of shape and space is what I find interesting and think is a key part of her compositions that I find successful.
After looking at Carmen Herrera's work I have been working in the studio and have gone on to create four Vinyl Tape pieces which range in scale. Although my work uses the everyday material of Vinyl Tape to express line and shape rather paint, I feel these four pieces still communicate a clear visual connection towards her work . Colour choice is a particular element I've drawn influence from and is a clear similarity between our work. (Yellow + Blue) (Red + White) (Green, White, Grey, Black).
