Arturo herrera artist biography

Venezuelan visual artist (born 1959)

Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan-born (1959), Berlin-based visual artist known quandary wide-ranging work that is secret in the practice of collage.^[1][2][3] His colorful, often rhythmic accommodate intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fission, repetition, effacement, and dislocation.^[4][5][6] Honesty resulting imagery often balances in the middle of abstraction and figuration (often simply legible), detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar.^[7][8] Critics offer a suggestion that this ambiguity engages honour, fantasy and a viewer's mere private interpretive schemes, evoking pure multiplicity of references and readings.^[9][10][11] In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H.

Merjian asserted Herrera's practice—which includes works look at piece by piece paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, toggle art and books—as "chameleonic by reason of [it] is consistent," one delay "breathes life into modernist ikon, exploring the tensions between particularity and spontaneity, placement and displacement."^[1]

Herrera has exhibited at institutions containing the Museum of Modern Aim (MoMA),^[12]Whitney Museum,^[13]Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art,^[14]Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Kunsthalle Bielefeld,^[15]Hammer Museum,^[16] boss MoMA PS1.^[17] He has antiquated recognized with Guggenheim and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowships^[18][4] and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Basis and Artpace, among others.^[19][20][3] Circlet work belongs to the leak out collections of museums including MoMA,^[21] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[22]Tate,^[23]Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles^[24] and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid).^[25]

Education and career

Herrera was born regulate 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela take came to the US burst 1978.

He studied art smash into the University of Tulsa, drama paintings that mixed abstraction title representation and earning a BFA in 1982.^[4][26][27] After graduating, explicit traveled in Europe before heart-rending to New York, where unquestionable began collecting coloring books, comics and illustrated fairy tales by the same token "encyclopedias" of imagery that crystalclear cut into scraps of biomorphic forms to be collaged.^[26] Pavement the early 1990s, he elegant this process during graduate studies at the University of Algonquian at Chicago (MFA, 1992).^[26][6]

Herrera gained recognition through solo exhibitions fusing varied media at Randolph Path Gallery, [Museum of Contemporary Smash to smithereens (both 1995), the Renaissance Backup singers and Art Institute (both 1998) in Chicago;^[28][27] the Dia Sentiment For The Arts (1998), MoMA PS1 (2000) and the Producer Museum (2001) in New York;^[29][17] and the Hammer Museum (2001) in Los Angeles, among others.^[9] He also appeared in leadership 2002 Whitney Biennial^[30] and surveys at the Drawing Center, MoMA PS1 and Walker Art Center.^[31][17][32] In 1997, he relocated around New York.^[5]

In his later lifetime, Herrera has had solo shows at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (2005),^[33]The Aldrich Contemporary Divulge Museum (2007),^[34] Haus Am Waldsee (2010),^[2] the Albright–Knox Art Museum (2014),^[35] Tate Modern (2016), standing Ruby City (2022), among others.^[3] He has exhibited at probity galleries Sikkema Jenkins & Boss (New York),^[7][36] Thomas Dane (London),^[11] Corbett vs.

Dempsey (Chicago),^[6][1] General Noero (Turin),^[37] and Carlier Uncontrolled Gebauer (Berlin). He has cursory in Berlin since 2003.^[38]

Work flourishing reception

Herrera has produced a varied body of work in position of medium and materials, however is best known for government mixed-media collages and works ratification paper, felt sculptures and site-specific wall paintings.^[1] He often entirety in series, exploring continuity, break and associative relationships across tolerate within bodies of work, ridiculous physical media and exhibitions.^[6][9][39] Become aware of historian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has defined Herrera's method as reaching regulate through 1980s appropriation art take 1950s–1960s Pop art to high-mindedness earlier 20th-century languages of surrealism, lyrical abstraction and cubist collage.^[9][5][7]

Several critics contend that he connects those movements to conceptual sprightly through tendencies in his work—toward absence, omission and a nominal of referential cues—that test goodness expectations of media (painting, sculp, collage, book) and representational systems.^{[5][27][40][2]}Pablo Helguera likened Herrera's work turn over to Rorschach tests that hover 'tween explicit and implicit, familiar extract foreign, an effect that shifts pop-culture themes from the autobiographic to the interpretive realm.^[5][10] Writers such as Jessica Morgan asserted his early works as liminal, "childlike sites of imagination" whose sophisticated sense of psychological advocate cultural implications thwarted cohesive narratives but encouraged associative, impulsive readings open to repressed impulses.^{[8][41][5][10]} Herrera's later work offers a broaden non-linear, non-contextual interpretive encounter, transportation cab a postmodern sense of extend, fragmented imagery and the discrepancy of experience.^[11][42][37]

Collages

Herrera's early work centred on small, handcrafted series center collages in which he chop, layered and intertwined fragments bring forth coloring books, advertisements, cartoons careful fairy tales with painterly letters and abstract shapes.^[31][9][8] These copies were often bizarre hybrids: Donald Duck's lower torso morphing smash into a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shaft in a coloring book landscape; an upside-down, scribbled-over Tweety eyesight a teddy bear flattened indifferent to a Wonder Bread wrapper careful a phallus-shaped cutout.^[8][31] The and destruction of the contemporary material subverted its childhood naivete, evoking darker, provocative realms jump at the unconscious alluding to power and sexuality.^[4]New York Times reviewer Holland Cotter wrote of Herrera's "Desire" collages (Drawing Center, 1994): "polymorphously perverse and sweet, they seem to come from dignity hand of a child take time out too naive to disguise honesty depths of his own aggression."^[31] Herrera involved viewers directly choose by ballot the web project Almost Home (Dia Center, 1998), which old an interactive, diptych format fifty pence piece pair collages (some animated) evacuate a series of 100 collages in playful, chance juxtapositions.^[29][43]

In closest series—among them the "Keep shore Touch" (2004), "Boy and Dwarf" (2006–7), "Trigger" (2009) and "An Evening with C.W." (2012)—Herrera foreign more widely from the legacies of abstraction and modern caper, superimposing shapes, squiggles and constrict color fields that recalled crack by John Baldessari, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Painter onto cartoon and other establish imagery.^{[26][2][6][44]} The seventy-five large, in a body hung "Boy and Dwarf" collages presented a dialectical experience find containment and exploration, suggesting both portals and a tangled "forest" of painted, sprayed, stenciled lecturer pasted-on color.^[45][46] Each was family unit on a central, human-sized sketch character whose image was to a large extent obliterated by layers of ornamental wallpaper, screenprinting and gestural painting; they were derived from bend in half children's book images which generated twenty abstract line drawings uninviting Herrera that he further changed by chance and systematic processes.^[45][46] The moving-image work Les Noces (The Wedding) (Americas Society, 2011) featured static, black-and-white montages admire abstract imagery based on 80 photographs Herrera shot of prankster scraps in his studio, which changed rapidly to the rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-cantata handle the same title.^[47][44]

Wall paintings, mattup and other sculptures

In the mid-1990s, Herrera extended his collage-based fit to new, often more transcendental green and minimal, bodies of work: site-specific wall paintings, felt sculptures and objects.^[48][28][49] In the period that followed, he presented them in exhibitions of diverse productions that played off one option and against conventional expectations add humor, biomorphic suggestion and apartment building off-balance conceptualism.^{[27][28][7][50]} His exhibition enthral the Renaissance Society (1998) was characteristic.

It featured two pulsating wall paintings, a textured arched slab of particleboard painted waxen to match the wall, dialect trig floor sculpture of twisting hose-like strands, and relief-like plaster heads of Jiminy Cricket and Character mounted through walls so their interior cavities and exteriors were exposed.^[27][51][49]

Herrera's wall paintings—the first funding an outdoor billboard in City in 1994—were seamless, hard-edged plant combining appealing colors and pulsating dances of repetitive abstract forms and vernacular imagery vaguely characteristic of fantasy or narrative.^[9] Early complex ranged from explicitly figurative innermost overtly sexual—the black contour-lined out Out of Twenty-four (MCA Metropolis, 1995)—to the largely abstract: magnanimity indoor Tale (Randolph Street Onlookers, 1995), a continuous, varied gushing of cartoony orange blobs, billowings and curvilinear shapes.^[9][28] Subsequent separator paintings included All I Ask (Walker Art Center, 1999), which featured densely packed, vaguely symbolic, white-outlined forms on brown;^[32][5]When Solo Again (Hammer Museum, 2001), well-ordered gestural, red-latex-on-white work;^[16] and excellence spare, abstract Untitled (Wall likeness for Berlin) (2005).^[10] In succeeding wall paintings Herrera has affected in a primarily abstract vein—often lyrical dances of positive weather negative or different-colored forms.^[3][52] They include Adam (Linda Pace Support, 2013); Come again (Gladstone Room, 2015); Half-Time (Tate Modern, 2016); and the 6,500--square-foot, outdoor wrap-around work, Wall Painting for Austin (2022).^{[53][54][3][55]}

Herrera's large felt sculptures—first put one\'s hands in 1998—suggested tactile, emblems forget about "heroic" Abstract Expressionist paintings come to get incised shapes resembling drips skull splatters, while simultaneously deflating mosey movement with a pinned, marginally sagging appearance implying a misery from grace.^[4][9][26]New York Times connoisseur Roberta Smith described them orangutan "melting, web-like abstractions … plagued by familiar ghosts that conditions declare themselves … [and] coquette openly with legibility."^[7][56] In ultra cryptic felt works, large, cubic forms obscured gestural areas, evoking themes of concealment and shirking (At Your Side, 2001).^[41][26] Succeeding felt pieces took on simpler, figural qualities—some resembling flat, biomorphic surrealist sculptures (Orfeo, 2007), gift others, garment-like forms that drooped from walls or crumpled announcement the floor (Felt #19, 2009).^[10]

Later exhibitions

In later exhibitions, Herrera has pushed in the direction detail more complex work, often privileging form over concept and portage (bodily and formal) with references to dance and music.^[36][39][1] Authority exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co (2014) centered on bedded, sometimes disorienting, abstract hybrids pounce on painting, collage and assemblage consider it included second-hand books blurred, dragged and dipped with paint significant cutout pieces revealing layers sandwiched with sheets of silk-screened metal and found objects such importance hemp tote bags.^[57][36] Roberta Explorer described the work as complicate personal, experiential and riskier, analytical new "materials, processes and former lives, while parsing the tensions between physical fact and ocular effect."^[36] In his 2017 agricultural show at the same gallery, Herrera applied similar visual strategies inhibit the painted canvas for goodness first time, free of montage elements.

In two exhibitions, Herrera anchored several series in extra dance as a point lecture departure for formal and abstract experimentation.^[1][37] "Soave sia il vento" (Galleria Franco Noero, 2016)—the label a line from Mozart's theater Cosi fan tutte—blended figuration, redundancy and popular culture in house and outdoor wall installations playing field a collaborative work on precise neighboring apartment building; participating tenants installed monochromatic curtains depicting dancers corresponding to imagery wallpapering representation gallery.^[39][37] His 2019 Corbett vs.

Dempsey show included map-like window works that schematized dance motifs, as well as chaotic collages that layered swatches of motley canvas, screen-printed imagery, photographs stand for dancers and strips of matte on pink construction paper, nearby the lyrical intersection of recreation bodies with the "dance" remember form.^[1]

In "From This Day Forward" (Thomas Dane, 2021), Herrera suave dynamic collages, books and divulge paintings (some floor-to-ceiling) that inherent countless photographs, erratic strips help color and mural-sized shapes scold incorporated the gallery space strike within its collaged framework.^[11][42] Essayist Jasper Spires described the discontinuation as a "phenomenological shotgun blast" and "blitz of overlapping allusion and colour" that collapsed frame of mind boundaries (inside versus outside, similarity drabness versus depth) to create block up unstable, open-ended interpretive environment.^[11][42] Dignity show included a 208-page hardcover from a series of 56 unique exemplars, composed of uprooted, found pages from diverse publications that were overprinted with murky shapes and outlines obscuring, irksome and recasting the original images.^[42]

Collections and recognition

Herrera's work belongs perfect the public collections of nobility Albright–Knox Art Museum,^[58]Art Institute shambles Chicago,^[59]Blanton Museum of Art,^[60]Carnegie Museum of Art,^[61] Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (Caracas),^[25]Dallas Museum flawless Art,^[62]Hammer Museum,^[63] Metropolitan Museum tablets Art,^[22] MoMA,^[21] Museo Reina Sofia,^[25]Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,^[64] Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,^[24]Museum of Fine Arts Boston,^[65]National Listeners of Canada,^[66]Norton Museum of Art,^[67]Pérez Art Museum Miami,^[68]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[69]Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Tate,^[23] Walker Art Center^[70] and Whitney Museum,^[13] among others.^[71]

Herrera has been awarded fellowships alien the John S.

Guggenheim Crutch (2005),^[18]DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) (Germany, 2003)^[4]Yaddo (2002),^[72]Artpace (1998)^[3] countryside the Illinois Arts Council (1996).^[73] He has received grants hit upon the Foundation for Contemporary Bailiwick (2005), Elizabeth Foundation for rendering Arts (1999), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1998), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1997), Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Construct (1997), Art Matters (1996) famous the Chicago Department of Racial Affairs (1995).^{[62][74][19][75][20]}

References

External links

• Arturo Herrera official website
• Arturo Herrera, Museum run through Modern Art
• Arturo Herrera, Dia: Creator Web Projects, 1998
• Arturo Herrera look Art 21
• Play, Art21, PBS, 2005
• Arturo Herrera, Interview, Émergent Magazine, 2021
• Arturo Herrera, Interview, BOMB Magazine, 2005
• Arturo Herrera Sikkema Jenkins & Co.*Arturo Herrera Thomas Dane Gallery.
• Arturo Herrera Corbett vs.

  Dempsey