Arturo Herrera was born
in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York
and Berlin, Germany. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa,
Oklahoma,
and an
MFA
from the
University
of
Illinois
at Chicago. Herrera’s work includes collage, work on paper,
sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings.
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 fabric and pins
the fabric to the wall so that it hangs like 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. Herrera has received many awards including,
among others, a DAAD Fellowship. He 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; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center,
New York, among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial
(2002).
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York | Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin |
