In canvases and sculpture created during the last years of her life, Carmen Herrera, an under-sung hero of minimalism and abstraction, receives further attention.
Carmen Herrera: I’m Nobody! Who are you?
March 1–September 15, 2024
SITE Santa Fe
In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented artist Carmen Herrera’s first museum retrospective. Recently, Lisson Gallery in New York showed an exhibition of Herrera’s paintings on paper, while an exhibition of Herrera’s sculpture at Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, opened in May. And now, at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, a body of Herrera’s work—paintings conveying both massiveness and mastery, and hefty abstract sculptures, on loan from Lisson—continues through September 15, 2024.
This solo exhibition of work by the Cuban-born American abstract and minimalist artist takes its title, I’m Nobody! Who are you?, from an Emily Dickinson poem of which Herrera was fond. But the title also strikes back at the extent to which Herrera, as a Latina artist and immigrant, and her work, which emerged alongside that of more-celebrated white male artists in the 1950s, was ignored. (Herrera sold her first piece at age eighty-nine.) The Santa Fe exhibition, curated by Brandee Caoba, takes another step to rectify that oversight.
Herrera trained as an architect at the Universidad de La Habana in the late 1930s, and her famous remark, “I wouldn’t paint the way I do if I hadn’t gone to architecture school,” is borne out in this exhibition, along with her oft-quoted, “I never met a straight line I did not like.” Made from 2010 to 2017, when Herrera was between the ages of ninety-five and 102, these large-scale paintings reverberate with saturated color, sharp-edged shape, and an optics of line and space that challenges perspective. In these masterworks of geometric abstraction, color is subject and line is shape—even more so in her Estructuras, conceived in the 1960s and ‘70s and fabricated in 2019. Herrera died in 2022, at the age of 106.
Vivid green, a Klein-like blue (but with more levity), arresting orange, and sunshine-y yellow are among the colors Herrera perfected, which vibrate from the canvases and sculptural forms. But it’s the bare-canvas works—my favorite being Doric (2011), on which Herrera painted wide, offset, white triangles—that her true minimalist sensibility is revealed. Look long enough at these paintings, in which the tan canvas is also paired in rigid correspondence with bright red, black, or yellow, and a Rubin’s vase or figure-ground effect occurs in the mind’s eye. In Herrera’s artfully balanced compositions—highlighting her nuanced understanding of positive and negative space, while distilling color, shape, and structure to their essence—lie her mastery.
Herrera studied art history and French in Paris as a teenager, then studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1943-47. She returned to Paris from 1948-1953, where she refined her unique geometric abstract style into the precise lines and color palette that preceded the Minimalist movement by nearly a decade. She loved line, which she believed had the power to construct and connect, simplify and define. In I’m Nobody! Who are you?, Herrera’s lifetime pursuit of refinement and purification is evidenced, as well as the power of her work to vivify the senses.
