Arturo Herrera
17 Jan - 15 Mar 2008
ARTURO HERRERA
Opening Hours: 11 am – 2 pm & 4:30 - 8:30 pm
Opening: Thursday 17th January 2008, 8 pm
This is Arturo Herrera’s first exhibition at Galería Helga de Alvear. Born in Caracas in 1959, Herrera currently lives between Berlin and New York, the city where he has developed most of his career. He studied at the universities of Tulsa and Illinois of Chicago, and began exhibiting his work in the 1990s.
His highly personal and unmistakable painting blends references from many origins to create hybrid and highly evocative forms. His diverse practice includes painting, drawing and collage, and has previously worked with fabrics, felts or drawing directly on the wall in large format works.
Herrera’s work is grounded in associative thought techniques, a method known and used in modern art since the Surrealists, in combination with personal references such as illustrations from fairytales, with flat, shapeless almost melted forms. Thus, details or shapes related to childhood memory are coupled with sexual motifs to give form to rhythm-charged compositions reminiscent of calligraphic writing, affording us a fleeting glimpse of the boundary between figuration and abstraction.
His fragmentation and recontextualisation of images puts together references and drawings from comics or cartoons (Disney characters are a regular source of iconography for Arturo Herrera) alongside other abstracted ones. In his drawings, we identify images that end up being not what they seem, confusing and provoking feelings of disquiet and restlessness, while leaving the viewer with a sense of astonishment and irony
The result is a highly singular and personal body of work with its own language. Both provocative and evocative, Herrera’s work creates a universe which we know where and how it started, but never how it may be resolved
Herrera’s work was seen at the Istanbul (1999) and Whitney (2002) Biennials, and also in group shows at MCA Chicago (2000), PS1 in New York (2000), Castello di Rivoli (2001), MOMA of New York (2007) and CGAC in Santiago de Compostela
Opening Hours: 11 am – 2 pm & 4:30 - 8:30 pm
Opening: Thursday 17th January 2008, 8 pm
This is Arturo Herrera’s first exhibition at Galería Helga de Alvear. Born in Caracas in 1959, Herrera currently lives between Berlin and New York, the city where he has developed most of his career. He studied at the universities of Tulsa and Illinois of Chicago, and began exhibiting his work in the 1990s.
His highly personal and unmistakable painting blends references from many origins to create hybrid and highly evocative forms. His diverse practice includes painting, drawing and collage, and has previously worked with fabrics, felts or drawing directly on the wall in large format works.
Herrera’s work is grounded in associative thought techniques, a method known and used in modern art since the Surrealists, in combination with personal references such as illustrations from fairytales, with flat, shapeless almost melted forms. Thus, details or shapes related to childhood memory are coupled with sexual motifs to give form to rhythm-charged compositions reminiscent of calligraphic writing, affording us a fleeting glimpse of the boundary between figuration and abstraction.
His fragmentation and recontextualisation of images puts together references and drawings from comics or cartoons (Disney characters are a regular source of iconography for Arturo Herrera) alongside other abstracted ones. In his drawings, we identify images that end up being not what they seem, confusing and provoking feelings of disquiet and restlessness, while leaving the viewer with a sense of astonishment and irony
The result is a highly singular and personal body of work with its own language. Both provocative and evocative, Herrera’s work creates a universe which we know where and how it started, but never how it may be resolved
Herrera’s work was seen at the Istanbul (1999) and Whitney (2002) Biennials, and also in group shows at MCA Chicago (2000), PS1 in New York (2000), Castello di Rivoli (2001), MOMA of New York (2007) and CGAC in Santiago de Compostela