For the second exhibition in the new East Hampton location, Lisson Gallery is pleased to present a recent painting and corresponding painting on paper by Carmen Herrera. The works on view will be included in Carmen Herrera: Painting in Process, a solo exhibition at the gallery’s location at 504 West 24th Street in Manhattan that will be on view from September 10 to October 24, 2020. Colour Me In, an exhibition of important and rarely seen works made in the mid 1980s and early 1990s, will also open at The Perimeter in London on September 25.
Since her time in Paris in the late 1940s when she first developed her signature hard-edged style, Carmen Herrera has instilled a rigorous practice of sketching her compositions on paper prior to beginning a painting. She typically creates these forms with a ruler or a triangle, tools from her early training as an architect. After...exploring the relationship between form and color in these preliminary sketches, Herrera then proceeds with a formal painting on paper. By the time she touches the canvas most of the decisions about the work have already been made, although it is not unusual to see the orientation change as she finalizes the work in larger scale. It is within her works on paper that Herrera explores, and ultimately achieves, the harmonious relationship between otherwise opposing geometric shapes.
In the pairing on view, the painting on paper demonstrates this careful consideration of dimension, creating two bold planes: a red polygon to the left, and an orange right triangle to its right. When transitioning this configuration to canvas for Desierto Rojo, Herrera has re-oriented the orange component to the top of the picture plane, thus evoking a reference to landscape through composition and title. Installed alongside one another, these works both demonstrate the artist’s diligent and methodical process, as well as her playful mastering of tension, form and space.
For its inauguration this summer, the 1,000 square foot East Hampton space will highlight one work per week by gallery artists – with upcoming presentations by Anish Kapoor, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Sean Scully and Leon Polk Smith, among others – featuring both seminal, historic artworks and premiering new bodies of work. This focused format, in an intimate setting, recalls the origins of Lisson Gallery, which was established in 1967 in a storefront window on London’s Bell Street. The Long Island location of the new space joins Lisson’s two other locations in the New York area, including the recent expansion to a second location on West 24th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The gallery will be open to the public Thursday to Sunday, from 11am to 4pm, and by appointment on Mondays.
The health and safety of visitors remains a top priority, and strict measures will be implemented in the space to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. A mask will be required for entry, and hand sanitizer will be provided. Please visit our website for further details about the guidelines and to schedule an appointment.
About Carmen Herrera
Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of color: “My quest”, she says, “is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions” (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Her work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she says, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential” (2005). While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera’s body of work has established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. She moved frequently between France and Cuba throughout the 1930s and 1940s; having started studying architecture at the Universidad de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (1938– 39), she trained at the Art Students League, New York, NY, USA (1942–43), before exhibiting five times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1949–53). She settled in New York in 1954, where she continues to live and work. Herrera’s work was the subject of a large-scale survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2017), which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (2017) and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20) in Düsseldorf, Germany (2017–2018). A selection of Herrera's recent paintings and Estructuras inaugurated Lisson Gallery New York’s 24th Street exhibition space in May 2016. Herrera has also had solo exhibitions at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2009); and Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA (1998). She has been included in the group shows at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA (2017); The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2017); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2016); Phoenix Museum of Art, AZ, USA (2013); and Sheldon Museum of Art, NE, USA (2012), among others. In 2018, her work was featured in exhibitions ‘Géométries Sud, Du Mexique à la Terre de Feu’ at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, France and ‘Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera’ at The Met Breuer in New York. In the summer of 2019, a group of Herrera’s Estructuras were installed in City Hall Park, New York, presented by The Public Art Fund.
Herrera was awarded two fellowships from the Cintas Foundation, New York, NY, USA (1966–68) and a grant by the Creative Artists Public Service, New York, NY, USA (1977). Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Tate Collection, London, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, USA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA; the Institute of Fine Arts Boston, MA, USA; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR, USA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA; Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany and MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
About Lisson Gallery
Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and promotes the work of more than 60 international artists across two spaces in London and two in New York as well as one in Shanghai. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists, such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists as well as others of that generation from Carmen Herrera to the renowned estates of Leon Polk Smith, Ted Stamm and Roy Colmer. In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Susan Hiller, Tatsuo Miyajima and Sean Scully. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists led by Cory Arcangel, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Ryan Gander, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost, Pedro Reyes and Wael Shawky.
Entrada actualizada el el 22 jul de 2021
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