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Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera's practice uses techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization to prompt provocative and open-ended questions. Employing the mediums of collage, sculpture, relief, wall painting, works on paper, photography, and felt wall hangings, Herrera creates worlds of intertwining fragments. Drawn and ready-made shapes, abstract forms and partially obscured images mesh together in order to activate the viewer’s subconscious, through processes of memory, recollection, and association. In his work, found images from the world of popular culture are combined with fragments taken from a wide variety of sources, subverting the original context with a more open and ambiguous psychology. Herrera’s wall paintings also play with a similar dynamic between recognizable imagery with abstraction. His felt works, which are shaped from a piece of cut felt and pinned to the wall in mangled forms, resemble the drips and splattered qualities of his paintings while also playing with negative and positive spaces within the realm of contaminated abstraction. 

Arturo Herrera (b. 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works in Berlin. Herrera has received many awards including fellowships at the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) in Berlin, Germany and the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002), and is featured in over 40 permanent collections, including Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Tate Modern, in London.