Lot 38 D

Carmen Herrera pertained to the most significant protagonists of geometric abstraction.
The artist came from a cosmopolitan family of intellectuals from Cuba. She received lessons in painting and sculpture at an early age and lived in Paris for a year in 1929. In Havana, she first participated in exhibitions and began to study architecture, which she had to abandon due to the political unrest. In 1939, the artist moved to New York with her American husband where she studied at the Art Students League and befriended Barnett Newman. The couple relocated to Paris in 1948, maintaining close contacts in the cultural scene.
This period was of utmost importance for Herrera’s development. Coined by avant-gardist influences, she abandoned her initial figuration and revolved around geometric and lyrical abstraction. As a member of the artist group “Réalités Nouvelles”, she exhibited with Sonia Delaunay, among others.
Following her return to New York in 1954, Herrera’s affinity to straight-lined architectonic concepts of form paved the way to her final pictorial language of hard-edge painting. Her rhythmic compositions, reduced in colour and form, are characterised by two-tone contrasts, flawless surfaces, and an object-like character.
Herrera repeatedly participated in exhibitions. In 1984, a retrospective was dedicated to her, but for decades, broad recognition remained elusive. It is only recently that the extraordinary quality of her œuvre has been recognised, latterly through the sensational retrospective organised in 2016 by the Whitney Museum and the Kunstsammlungen Nordrhein-Westfalen.