Image: Carmen Herrera, Amarillo "Dos", 1971 Acrylic on wood 40 x 70 x 3 1/4 in. Maria Graciela and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection © Carmen Herrera
This exhibit will be closing April 16, 2017 at Wexner Center for the Arts:
“The show presents her as an artist of formidable discipline, consistency and clarity of purpose, and a key player in any history of postwar art.”—New York Times
Celebrate the extraordinary artistic vision of Carmen Herrera—a groundbreaking Cuban-born, New York–based artist—in the first museum survey of her work in nearly two decades. Although Herrera’s distilled, geometric style emerged concurrently with but independently of other vanguard, mid-20th-century artists like Ellsworth Kelly, for many years her masterful work has not received the critical attention it merits. Discover her genius for yourself in this much-lauded exhibition that makes its only stop outside of New York at the Wex.
Featuring more than 50 works, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight focuses on the artist’s work from 1948 to 1978, when she developed the signature hard-edged style that she continues to employ today at the age of 101. Displayed chronologically, the exhibition begins with paintings made while Herrera was in Paris (1948–54), works that echo cubist innovations of the early 20th century in a postwar context. Herrera unflinchingly continued to explore geometry, space, and the line in increasingly spare and refined compositions as she returned to New York in 1954, when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme. You’ll also see stunning works from Herrera’s Blanco y Verde series (1959–71) and her dynamic Days of the Weekseries (1975–78), which illustrates her deft play with figure-ground relationships, as well as wooden sculptural “estructuras” that reveal her deep interest in architecture.
Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.