Carmen Herrera, Pioneer of Hard-Edged Abstraction, Dies at 106

Carmen Herrera b. 1915, Cuba Follow +

Artist Carmen Herrera passed away on Saturday in the New York apartment where she lived and worked since 1967.

The news was announced yesterday by Lisson Gallery, which has represented Herrera since 2010.

‘Carmen made works that are alive and in constant flux, even when she seemed to have reached an apotheosis or a summit, she kept looking over the edge,’ said Alex Logsdail, Lisson’s executive director.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1915, Herrera trained as an architect before moving to New York in 1939 where she studied at The Art Students League.

She developed her style of hard-edged geometric abstraction—wherein ovals, rectangles, triangles, and semi-circles overlap and interlock—in Paris, where she lived from 1948 to 1953, exhibiting at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and mingling with the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Incredibly, Herrera’s work received next to no coverage before being mentioned in a short review by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter in 1998. He described her series of black-and-white paintings as ‘an abstract art of quietly jazzy linear patterns’.

Herrera wouldn’t sell a painting until 2004, when she was already 89. Following an exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham in 2009, Observer art critic Laura Cumming wrote, ‘Carmen Herrera is the discovery of the year—of the decade’. She went on to show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2016 exhibition Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight.

Herrera said that earlier in her career she was frequently dismissed as a female artist painting in a style that was perceived as male. Success came more easily to male peers such as Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman, who she said were better able to navigate the world of collectors, galleries, and museums.

‘Gaining recognition late in life, she will be fondly remembered for her unique style and the enduring impact of her work,’ Lisson shared on Twitter today.

The gallery will stage a solo exhibition of Herrera’s work at its New York space in May and another to inaugurate Lisson Gallery’s new Los Angeles space in autumn. —[O]

Main image: Carmen Herrera, Amarillo Tres (1971/2018). Acrylic and aluminium. 213.4 x 160 x 25.4 cm. © Carmen Herrera. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.