Carmen Herrera painted for over seven decades, receiving recognition for her elegant, hard-edge style late in life. Having developed her signature style in the late 1940s, her work connects to artists such as Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, as well as the Neo-concrete work of artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who flourished in Brazil after World War II. She made large-scale paintings, drawings, sculpture, and much later in life, began making murals modeled after her paintings, many of which have never been executed. Based on her painting La Fonteyn (2015), Untitled (2021) is realized here for the first time.
Born in Cuba, Carmen Herrera moved to New York City in 1954, where she lived until her death at the age of 106. From 1948 to 1954, Herrera lived in Paris and exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, alongside artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Jean Arp, all of whom focused on abstraction. In New York, her work was displayed at the Alternative Museum in the East Village and El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. The twenty-first century brought her increased recognition, and in 2016 (at the age of 101), the Whitney Museum of American Art opened her career retrospective solidifying her groundbreaking contribution to geometric abstraction.
SPONSOR
Marietta Wu and Tom Yamamoto
