Arturo Herrera (b. 1959) is a Venezuelan-born, Berlin-based visual artist known for wide-ranging work that is rooted in the practice of collage.Merjian, Ara H. "Arturo Herrera's Latest Works Reinvigorate Modernist Collage Practices," Art in America, March 2020, p. 86–87. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Byrt, Anthony. "Arturo Herrera," Artforum, April 27, 2010. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Purcell, Barbara. "Greater Than Its Parts: Arturo Herrera's “Constructed Collage," Glasstire, April 15, 2022. Retrieved April 5, 2023. His colorful, often rhythmic art intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fragmentation, repetition, effacement, and dislocation.ART21. "Arturo Herrera," Artists.. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Helguera, Pablo. "The Edges of the Invisible," Art Nexus, August–October 1999, p. 48–52.Grabner, Michelle. "Arturo Herrera's 'Series,'" Art Agenda June 26, 2012. The resulting imagery often balances between abstraction and figuration (often barely legible), detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar.Smith, Roberta. "Arturo Herrera," The New York Times, April 17, 2002. p. E35. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Morgan, Jessica. "Arturo Herrera," Grand Street, No. 66, 1998. Critics suggest that this ambiguity engages memory, fantasy and a viewer's unconscious private interpretive schemes, evoking a multiplicity of references and readings.Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. "Hammer Projects: Arturo Herrera," Hammer Museum, 2001. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Ledezma, Juan. "Arturo Herrera: The Historical Object of Desire/El objeto histórico del deseo," Arte al Dia No. 122, 2008, p. 24–29.Spires, Jasper. "Arturo Herrera 'From This Day Forward' Thomas Dane Gallery / London," FAD Magazine, April 8, 2021. Retrieved April 5, 2023. In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H. Merjian described Herrera's practice—which includes works on paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, public art and books—as "chameleonic as [it] is consistent," one that "breathes life into modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement."
Herrera has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Smith, Roberta. "Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees," The New York Times, March 2, 2007. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art. Arturo Herrera, Artists. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art,Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art. "The Moderns," Exhibitions. Retrieved April 30, 2023. Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Kunsthalle Bielefeld,Mehring, Christine. "For the Time Being," Artforum, May 2013. Retrieved April 30, 2023. Hammer Museum,Hammer Museum. "Hammer Projects: Arturo Herrera," Exhibitions, 2001. Retrieved April 6, 2023. and MoMA PS1.Museum of Modern Art. Arturo Herrera, Exhibitions. Retrieved April 5, 2023. He has been recognized with Guggenheim and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowshipsJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Arturo Herrera, Fellows. Retrieved April 5, 2023. and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artpace, among others.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Arturo Herrera, Artists. Retrieved April 10, 2023.Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Previous Biennial Competition Award Winners. Retrieved April 10, 2023. His work belongs to the public collections of museums including MoMA,Museum of Modern Art. Arturo Herrera, Art and Artists. Retrieved April 5, 2023. the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Arturo Herrera, Art Collection. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Tate,Tate. Arturo Herrera, Artists. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Arturo Herrera, Artists. Retrieved April 5, 2023. and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid).Museo Reina Sofia. "La Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) dona a la Fundación Museo Reina Sofía 45 obras de arte contemporáneo latinoamericano," November 30, 2019. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
Education and career Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela and came to the US in 1978. He studied art at the University of Tulsa, producing paintings that mixed abstraction and representation and earning a BFA in 1982.Colman, David. "The clue-filled collages of Arturo Herrera," Elle Décor, September 2007, p. 98–100.Camper, Fred. "Powers of Subtraction," Chicago Reader, February 13, 1998, p. 28–29. Retrieved April 5, 2023. After graduating, he traveled in Europe before moving to New York, where he began collecting coloring books, comics and illustrated fairy tales as "encyclopedias" of imagery that he cut into scraps of biomorphic forms to be collaged. In the early 1990s, he refined this process during graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (MFA, 1992).
Herrera gained recognition through solo exhibitions mixing varied media at Randolph Street Gallery, [Museum of Contemporary Art (both 1995), the Renaissance Society and Art Institute (both 1998) in Chicago;Hixson, Kathryn. "Arturo Herrera at Randolph Street Gallery," Flash Art, October 1995, p. 111. the Dia Center For The Arts (1998), MoMA PS1 (2000) and the Whitney Museum (2001) in New York;Copage, Eric V. "New York On Line; Click Here For Art," The New York Times, September 5, 2002. Retrieved April 5, 2023. and the Hammer Museum (2001) in Los Angeles, among others. He also appeared in the 2002 Whitney BiennialIsrael, Nico. "The Whitney Biennial," Artforum, January 2002. Retrieved April 5, 2023. and surveys at the Drawing Center, MoMA PS1 and Walker Art Center.Cotter, Holland. "The Joys of Childhood Re-examined," The New York Times, March 25, 1994, p. C28. Retrieved April 5, 2023.Briggs, Patricia. "Painting at the Edge of the World," Artforum, Summer 2001, p. 185–86. Retrieved April 5, 2023. In 1997, he relocated to New York.
In his later career, Herrera has had solo shows at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (2005),Meschede, Friedrich and Ingrid Schaffner. Arturo Herrera Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea, Xunta de Galicia, 2005. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2007),Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. "Arturo Herrera: Castles, Dwarfs, and Happychaps," Exhibitions. Retrieved April 10, 2023. Haus Am Waldsee (2010), the Albright–Knox Art Museum (2014),Dabkowski, Colin. "A Closer Look: Arturo Herrera's Walk," The Buffalo News, January 13, 2015. Tate Modern (2016), and Ruby City (2022), among others. He has exhibited at the galleries Sikkema Jenkins & Co (New York),Smith, Roberta. "Arturo Herrera," The New York Times, November 13, 2014. p. C29. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Thomas Dane (London), Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago), Franco Noero (Turin),Ricuperati, Gianluigi. "Arturo Herrera 'Soave sia il vento' at Galleria Franco Noero, Turin," Mousse Magazine, September 1, 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2023. and Carlier I Gebauer (Berlin). He has lived in Berlin since 2003.Nippe, Christina. "The Books of Others: Arturo Herrera in Berlin," Art in Print, Vol. 4 No. 2, July–August 2014.
Work and reception Herrera has produced a diverse body of work in terms of medium and materials, but is best known for his mixed-media collages and works on paper, felt sculptures and site-specific wall paintings. He often works in series, exploring continuity, discontinuity and associative relationships across and within bodies of work, different physical media and exhibitions.Domus. "Soave sia il vento," August 4, 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2023. Art historian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has characterized Herrera's method as reaching back through 1980s appropriation art and 1950s–1960s Pop art to the earlier 20th-century languages of surrealism, lyrical abstraction and cubist collage.
Several critics contend that he connects those movements to conceptual art through tendencies in his work—toward absence, omission and a minimum of referential cues—that test the expectations of media (painting, sculpture, collage, book) and representational systems.Walker, Hamza. "Arturo Herrera/A Gentle Trauma," The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 1998. Pablo Helguera likened Herrera's work to Rorschach tests that hover between explicit and implicit, familiar and foreign, an effect that shifts pop-culture themes from the autobiographical to the interpretive realm. Writers such as Jessica Morgan described his early works as liminal, "childlike sites of imagination" whose sophisticated sense of psychological and cultural implications thwarted cohesive narratives but encouraged associative, impulsive readings open to repressed impulses.Caniglia, Julie. "Arturo Herrera," Artforum, January 2001. p. 139. Retrieved April 5, 2023. Herrera's later work offers a more non-linear, non-contextual interpretive encounter, conveying a postmodern sense of proliferating, fragmented imagery and the multiplicity of experience.Roy, Jason. "Arturo Herrera: Unravelling in a collage of fragments," Émergent Magazine, April 2021. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
Collages Herrera's early work centered on small, handcrafted series of collages in which he cut, layered and intertwined fragments from coloring books, advertisements, cartoons and fairy tales with painterly marks and abstract shapes. These images were often bizarre hybrids: Donald Duck's lower torso morphing into a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar in a coloring book landscape; an upside-down, scribbled-over Tweety seeing a teddy bear flattened by a Wonder Bread wrapper and a phallus-shaped cutout. The splicing and destruction of the original material subverted its childhood innocence, evoking darker, provocative realms of the unconscious alluding to violence and sexuality. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Herrera's "Desire" collages (Drawing Center, 1994): "polymorphously perverse and sweet, they seem to come from the hand of a child still too naive to disguise the depths of his own aggression." Herrera involved viewers directly in the web project Almost Home (Dia Center, 1998), which used an interactive, diptych format to pair collages (some animated) from a series of 100 collages in playful, chance juxtapositions.Dia Arts Foundation. Arturo Herrera, Almost Home, Projects. Retrieved April 5, 2023.
In later series—among them the "Keep in Touch" (2004), "Boy and Dwarf" (2006–7), "Trigger" (2009) and "An Evening with C.W." (2012)—Herrera borrowed more widely from the legacies of abstraction and modern dance, superimposing shapes, squiggles and dense color fields that recalled work by John Baldessari, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock onto cartoon and other found imagery.Gibellini, Laura F. "Arturo Herrera, Americas Society," Arte Al Dia February–April 2011, p. 79. The seventy-five large, closely hung "Boy and Dwarf" collages presented a dialectical experience of containment and exploration, suggesting both portals and a tangled "forest" of painted, sprayed, stenciled and pasted-on color.Bader, Graham. Boy and Dwarf, New York: Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2007.Hickey, Dave. "Arturo Herrera: Easy As Pie," Arturo Herrera, Nigel Prince (ed), Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 2007. Each was based on a central, human-sized cartoon character whose image was largely obliterated by layers of decorative wallpaper, screenprinting and gestural painting; they were derived from two children's book images which generated twenty abstract line drawings by Herrera that he further altered by chance and systematic processes. The moving-image work Les Noces (The Wedding) (Americas Society, 2011) featured static, black-and-white montages of abstract imagery based on 80 photographs Herrera shot of cut-up scraps in his studio, which changed rapidly to the rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-cantata of the same title.Johnson, Ken. "Uptown, a Jumble of Treasures," The New York Times, April 21, 2011. Retrieved April 5, 2023.