Arturo Herrera

"The search for his own, new image leads Herrera to an actual destruction of original pictures and forces him to the hybridity of multiple and ambivalent associations. With these collages, he aims to find his way to an image that depicts the interrelations between destruction and construction, grasping the tension between order and disorder as a moment not yet depicted. The desire to extinguish an image automatically creates a new image. In this way Herrera creates a superfluity of information, opening up references on all conceivable levels."
Friedrich Meschede, excerpted in Arturo Herrera: You Go First, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

Arturo Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela. Solo and project-based exhibitions of his work have been held at Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York, the ICA Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, P.S.1 in New York, and The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, as well as on the website of the Dia Art Center. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, ArtPace, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Herrera is currently an artist resident at the DAAD in Berlin.

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

ARTURO HERRERA: SERIES
Text by Jens Asthoff, David Schutter. Conversation with John Corbett.
HOLZWARTH PUBLICATIONS
ISBN: 9783935567589 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 5/31/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

ARTURO HERRERA: LES NOCES (THE WEDDING)
Edited by Gabriela Rangel. Text by Nuit Banai, Lynn Garafola, Arturo Herrera, Gabriela Rangel.
AMERICAS SOCIETY
ISBN: 9781879128385 | US $22.00
Pub Date: 12/31/2011
Active | In stock

ARTURO HERRERA: BOY AND DWARF
Text by Graham Bader.
HOLZWARTH PUBLICATIONS
ISBN: 9783935567381 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 7/1/2007
Active | In stock

ARTURO HERRERA: YOU GO FIRST
Essay by Friedrich Meschede
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS, INC.
ISBN: 9781891024788 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 11/2/2004
Active | Awaiting stock

Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera: Series

Text by Jens Asthoff, David Schutter. Conversation with John Corbett.
Published by Holzwarth Publications

This volume collects 17 new collage series by Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera (born 1959)--works pitched somewhere between abstract composition and poetically fragmented scrapbooks of the everyday. As the artist writes: “Collage is our portrait of life rearranged and reordered.”

Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding)

Edited by Gabriela Rangel. Text by Nuit Banai, Lynn Garafola, Arturo Herrera, Gabriela Rangel.
Published by Americas Society

For this stochastic homage to Stravinsky, the abstractionist Arturo Herrera collaborated with a computer programmer in order to develop software that randomly draws from the artist's database of images to create an ever-changing sequence in response to the pitches of Stravinsky's music for the 1923 ballet Les Noces.

Arturo Herrera: Boy and Dwarf

Text by Graham Bader.
Published by Holzwarth Publications

A young boy and a dwarf give this book its title, but at first glance, it's hard to make out anything like them in Arturo Herrera's collages. Only a closer look will reveal the telling details in the work's rich texture: the bellows of an accordion, a dwarf's cap. Are these pictures representational or abstract? According to Herrera, "The challenge is, how can an image so recognizable, like a dwarf, have another meaning that I impose on it? Is it possible? Can I make something so clear ambiguous? Can I uproot it?" He can: The ambiguity of his collages slows down the gaze so that the figurative and the abstract cease to be simple opposites. And the repeated motif gives the eye free rein to study the method and virtuosity of Herrera's take on abstraction. This recent series of 74 large-format collage works on paper is based on two comic figures: an old dwarf and a young boy who plays accordion. The "front views" come from a children's coloring book, and Herrera commissioned an illustrator to draw "back views" of the figures. These are blown up, colored in and then layered with complex collage structures until the images almost disappear beneath the vivid surface abstraction.

Arturo Herrera: You Go First

Essay by Friedrich Meschede
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

Cartoons meets Surrealism by way of Abstract Expressionism in Arturo Herrera's multi-layered body of work, an oeuvre which progresses through specific stages of abstraction. You Go First is devoted to the primary and most essential stage of Herrera's production: collage. In his subversive paper and gouache combinations, Herrera abstracts barely recognizable childhood imagery into sly, formal adventures in vanguard two-dimensionality. Memories of once-familiar illustrations are triggered; recalling them fills in the blanks created by Herrera's cutting and pasting. Other phases of his art-making process push further and further from the original found imagery, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, to create completely abstract-seeming wall works and MDF sculptures. You Go First features nearly 100 collages produced during 2002, sequenced and selected by the artist himself.