artnexus #58

Carmen Herrera (Havana, 1915) began her studies in her native city, at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro, and completed them at Marymount College in Paris, at the Escuela de Arquitectura in Havana, and finally at the Arts Students League, in New York. In 1948 she left Cuba and relocated to Paris, where she remained until 1958. That year she moved to New York City, where she still lives and works.

In order to properly situate Herrera’s oeuvre, we need to think of early-Twentieth Century Russian avant-garde, especially the Constructivism practiced by artists like Malevitch and Lissitsky, alongside female painters like Natalia Goncharova and Alexandra Exter, not to mention Mondrian and the De Stijl movement.

A closer reference for her work is found in Latin America, where, since mid-century, enthusiastic groups of painters and sculptors practiced a kind of abstraction that sought, through rationality and inventiveness, to distance itself from the weight of realism and some subsets of Surrealism.

Herrera’s work reflects on the line, space, and the positive/negative relationship evident in her black and white pieces; a reductionistic intention simplifies and gives precision to her geometric structures. Thanks to her knowledge of the abstract expressionists, Herrera’s painting is not limited to a rigid, cerebral geometry, but constructs poetic compositions in which we find a profound investigation of the possibilities of color and the visual harmony than can be achieved through her geometric structures.

Herrera has shown her work in many individual and group exhibitions, in cities such as Paris, Zurich, Havana, and New York.

 

IVONNE PINI