Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera

Exhibition: Mar 9 – Apr 16, 2000


During his Artpace residency, Arturo Herrera produced multiple bodies of work including sculpture, paintings, prints, works on paper and architectural installations. The works continue Herrera’s investigations of content and form, working with fragmented images from popular culture.

In his new panel paintings, incised lines wind their way across the wooden surfaces. Painted a rich color, the linear trace invites interpretation: is it the marking from a map, the contour of a body or a form from nature? In another series of panel paintings, Herrera shapes the wood into curved abstractions, which suggest fragments of things or space. The surface of these works, precisely finished in solid colors, appear manufactured, yet the ambiguous shapes—neither industrial nor natural—ultimately suggest the cultural.

In another series, small-scale metal sculptures rest on the floor. Again, a reductive line is the source. Embellished with a brightly colored paint, the grounded sculptures are humorous and ambiguously sexual.

Working with Hare and Hound Press in San Antonio, Herrera has produced two editions of prints and photogravures. These works on paper extract and rearrange lines from popular sources with the staccato rhythm of animated cartoons. The relief prints contain negative space of white lines on a soft, baby blue foreground, evoking childhood memories in a dense, urban composition. Herrera’s photogravures are reductive and minimalist, containing graphic black lines on a crisp white surface.

Herrera’s work, playing a balancing act between abstraction and representation, shifts scale, experiments with form and ultimately, leaves itself wide open to the viewer. “The new works investigate a range of psychological impacts,” the artist comments. “The efficacy of fragmented forms provokes various levels of corporeal and intellectual resonance. I am interested in the effect of non-linear and associative readings on the viewer and the potential of painted space to be an intimate receptacle for the imagination and an aesthetic experience.”

Artist

Arturo Herrera

New York, New York, USA

Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tulsa and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Arturo Herrera´s multilayered body of work includes collages, painted wood sculptures, photographs, cut felt pieces and wall works. Using a fragmented language – whose lingering references range from popular culture to art history – to decontextualize inherent narratives without eradicating the coded referentiality of the image. The resulting works shift in between the explicit and the implicit. A pliability of meaning is played out trough the ambiguity of figurative and abstract forms. These forms do not enforce a specific message. Instead, they address the fragmentation and recomposition of mass-cultural elements to explore the impact of the adultered language of abstraction into the collective gaze.
Herrera’s site specific installations in 2017 can be found at the Officine Grandi Riparazioni / OGR in Turin; Bloomberg European Headquarters in London; and at the West Elm building at 8366 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles in conjunction with the exhibition How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. In 2016, Tate Modern commissioned Herrera to create a long-term wall painting for the sixth-floor restaurant.
Herrera’s solo and project-based exhibitions have been held at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; daadgalerie, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Dia Center for the Arts, NY; Art Gallery of Ontario; ICA Philadelphia; The UCLA Hammer Museum, MoMA, NY; and The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the DAAD, Berlin.

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Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
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Kellie Jones

New York, NY
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Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

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