Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera’s colorful, hard-edged geometric fields link North American and European movements such as Minimalism and Op art with modernist South American movements including the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretism, and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Herrera studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in the late 1930s. She moved between France and Cuba, then settled in New York in the 1950s. Like major mid-century American painters such as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland, Herrera embraced color and minimal forms. Yet her compositions didn’t gain traction in the United States until the 21st century; around 2009, she started receiving a slew of solo exhibitions. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of her work. Herrera has now been included in shows at the Mori Art Museum, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Underground Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In addition to her paintings, Herrera is well known for her large-scale aluminum sculptures called “Estructuras,” or “structures.”