Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan-born (1959), Berlin-based visual artist known for wide-ranging work that is rooted in the practice of collage.

His colorful, often rhythmic art intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fragmentation, repetition, effacement, and dislocation.

The resulting imagery often balances between abstraction and figuration (often barely legible), detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar.

Critics suggest that this ambiguity engages memory, fantasy and a viewer's unconscious private interpretive schemes, evoking a multiplicity of references and readings.

Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela and came to the US in 1978.

Art historian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has characterized Herrera's method as reaching back through 1980s appropriation art and 1950s–1960s Pop art to the earlier 20th-century languages of surrealism, lyrical abstraction and cubist collage.

Several critics contend that he connects those movements to conceptual art through tendencies in his work—toward absence, omission and a minimum of referential cues—that test the expectations of media (painting, sculpture, collage, book) and representational systems.

Pablo Helguera likened Herrera's work to Rorschach tests that hover between explicit and implicit, familiar and foreign, an effect that shifts pop-culture themes from the autobiographical to the interpretive realm.

Writers such as Jessica Morgan described his early works as liminal, "childlike sites of imagination" whose sophisticated sense of psychological and cultural implications thwarted cohesive narratives but encouraged associative, impulsive readings open to repressed impulses.

Herrera's later work offers a more non-linear, non-contextual interpretive encounter, conveying a postmodern sense of proliferating, fragmented imagery and the multiplicity of experience.

Herrera's early work centered on small, handcrafted series of collages in which he cut, layered and intertwined fragments from coloring books, advertisements, cartoons and fairy tales with painterly marks and abstract shapes.

These images were often bizarre hybrids: Donald Duck's lower torso morphing into a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar in a coloring book landscape; an upside-down, scribbled-over Tweety seeing a teddy bear flattened by a Wonder Bread wrapper and a phallus-shaped cutout.

The splicing and destruction of the original material subverted its childhood innocence, evoking darker, provocative realms of the unconscious alluding to violence and sexuality.

He studied art at the University of Tulsa, producing paintings that mixed abstraction and representation and earning a BFA in 1982.

After graduating, he traveled in Europe before moving to New York, where he began collecting coloring books, comics and illustrated fairy tales as "encyclopedias" of imagery that he cut into scraps of biomorphic forms to be collaged.

In the early 1990s, he refined this process during graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (MFA, 1992).

In the mid-1990s, Herrera extended his collage-based approach to new, often more abstract and minimal, bodies of work: site-specific wall paintings, felt sculptures and objects.

In the decade that followed, he presented them in exhibitions of diverse works that played off one another and against conventional expectations with humor, biomorphic suggestion and an off-balance conceptualism.

New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Herrera's "Desire" collages (Drawing Center, 1994): "polymorphously perverse and sweet, they seem to come from the hand of a child still too naive to disguise the depths of his own aggression."

Herrera's wall paintings—the first for an outdoor billboard in Chicago in 1994—were seamless, hard-edged works combining appealing colors and rhythmic dances of repetitive abstract forms and vernacular imagery vaguely suggesting fantasy or narrative.

Herrera gained recognition through solo exhibitions mixing varied media at Randolph Street Gallery, [Museum of Contemporary Art (both 1995), the Renaissance Society and Art Institute (both 1998) in Chicago; the Dia Center For The Arts (1998), MoMA PS1 (2000) and the Whitney Museum (2001) in New York; and the Hammer Museum (2001) in Los Angeles, among others.

In 1997, he relocated to New York.

Herrera involved viewers directly in the web project Almost Home (Dia Center, 1998), which used an interactive, diptych format to pair collages (some animated) from a series of 100 collages in playful, chance juxtapositions.

His exhibition at the Renaissance Society (1998) was characteristic.

It featured two vibrant wall paintings, a textured curving slab of particleboard painted white to match the wall, a floor sculpture of twisting hose-like strands, and relief-like plaster heads of Jiminy Cricket and Pluto mounted through walls so their interior cavities and exteriors were exposed.

He also appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and surveys at the Drawing Center, MoMA PS1 and Walker Art Center.

He has lived in Berlin since 2003.

Herrera has produced a diverse body of work in terms of medium and materials, but is best known for his mixed-media collages and works on paper, felt sculptures and site-specific wall paintings.

He often works in series, exploring continuity, discontinuity and associative relationships across and within bodies of work, different physical media and exhibitions.

In later series—among them the "Keep in Touch" (2004), "Boy and Dwarf" (2006–7), "Trigger" (2009) and "An Evening with C.W."

In his later career, Herrera has had solo shows at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (2005), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2007), Haus Am Waldsee (2010), the Albright–Knox Art Museum (2014), Tate Modern (2016), and Ruby City (2022), among others.

He has exhibited at the galleries Sikkema Jenkins & Co (New York), Thomas Dane (London), Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago), Franco Noero (Turin), and Carlier I Gebauer (Berlin).

The moving-image work Les Noces (The Wedding) (Americas Society, 2011) featured static, black-and-white montages of abstract imagery based on 80 photographs Herrera shot of cut-up scraps in his studio, which changed rapidly to the rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-cantata of the same title.

(2012)—Herrera borrowed more widely from the legacies of abstraction and modern dance, superimposing shapes, squiggles and dense color fields that recalled work by John Baldessari, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock onto cartoon and other found imagery.

The seventy-five large, closely hung "Boy and Dwarf" collages presented a dialectical experience of containment and exploration, suggesting both portals and a tangled "forest" of painted, sprayed, stenciled and pasted-on color.

Each was based on a central, human-sized cartoon character whose image was largely obliterated by layers of decorative wallpaper, screenprinting and gestural painting; they were derived from two children's book images which generated twenty abstract line drawings by Herrera that he further altered by chance and systematic processes.

In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H. Merjian described Herrera's practice—which includes works on paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, public art and books—as "chameleonic as [it] is consistent," one that "breathes life into modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement."

Herrera has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Hammer Museum, and MoMA PS1.

He has been recognized with Guggenheim and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowships and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artpace, among others.

His work belongs to the public collections of museums including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid).