Carmen Herrera

1 Feb-3 Mar 2012

Overview

A survey show of works from the 1940’s to the present day, including new works. Cuban artist Carmen Herrera was born in 1915. She moved frequently between France and her homeland in Cuba throughout the 1930s and 40s, before finally settling in New York in 1954. Despite the visionary nature of her work and association with artists of great reputation, including Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, Herrera’s paintings were the subject of few exhibitions, until a large-scale survey at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2009. This story of neglect was familiar to many women artists of her generation who emerged during the post-war years. Herrera’s work is characterised with reference to the lineage of modernist abstraction, particularly Latin American nonrepresentational concrete painting, thus establishing a cross-cultural dialogue within this international tradition. At the heart of Herrera’s work is a striking formal simplicity and attention to colour. Devoid of any referential aspects, her paintings combine line, form and space to convey an intense physicality.