Carmen Herrera

Core to Carmen Herrera’s (1915, Havana – 2022, New York) work is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of color. A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera created symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. She moved from Havana to New York in 1939, and her painting moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, where she lived from 1948-1954. Herrera’s art chimes with her peers from the U.S. school, such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, as well as Latin American concretism. Overlooked until late in life, her body of work established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.