Arturo Herrera does not seem to have his own web page, yet his work can be found at the following galleries:
Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
The Museum of Modern Art
Thomas Dane Gallery
Ro Gallery
BIOGRAPHY
“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).”
Biography from Ro Gallery
INTERVIEWS
Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.
Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.
QUOTES
“It’s interesting to me after I did the photographs, is that images that I thought were already finished in paper form and collages have a complete different life now.”
“Life is made of, just connecting things. We’re not really clear about why we connect things. Our emotional life is a very important part of this, and I think that memory is also a very important part of this. And desire. So, when looking at visual images, you could actually be informed by association only.”
“The whole tone quality is almost like graphite. It’s almost like drawing. Usually photography is so much about perfect blacks and whites, and these are really about perfect grays. So I’m interested in this kind of ambiguity about the images. They are clearly fragments and they’re being juxtaposed of being forced to be put together, and yet, they’re just abstractions. I think that there is a potential for these images to communicate different things to different viewers in a very touching way. But that experience is not a public experience, it’s very very private, and very very personal.”
-All quotes from above videos
IMAGES
I am specifically focusing on Herrera's series of 80 black and white photographs, entitled "Untitled" (2005).
Herrera's process with his photographs is very similar to mine. It's really up to chance, and the mistakes become the core of the piece. It's not about the quality of the whites and the blacks, but it's about the muddy grays that make the piece. I absolutely love the last quote I picked out from the video. I feel like that speaks so much to my presentation as a whole, that maybe he was actually talking about me. I am interested in Herrera's other collage work, yet I feel as if his photographs speak much more closely to what I am currently working on.
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