Arturo Herrera
°1959, Caracas (VZ) – lives and works in New York (US) and Berlin (DE)
Arturo Herrera has developed a multilayered body of work that includes collages, sculptures, photographs, cut felt pieces and wall works. His work taps into the viewer’s unconscious—often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection.
Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages, he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of felt and pins the felt to the wall so that it hangs as a tangled form, resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Herrera’s wall paintings also meld recognizable imagery with abstraction, but on an environmental scale that he compares to the qualities of dance and music.
(courtesy of Art21)
Herrera has has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and MoMa P.S.1, New York. The work is Herrera is part of important public collections, such as MC, Chicago; Britain, London; Tate The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas; and SF MoMA, San Francisco.
Arturo Herrera is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of his work.
Thomas Dane Gallery, London / Naples
Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
You can also discover more of Herrera’s work on his own website.
