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The first monograph on Venezuelan multimedia artist Arturo Herrera in nearly twenty years, this comprehensive book takes a deep look at his diverse body of work.This new publication
highlights the breadth of Herrera’s practice from the start of his career to the present, showcasing painting, mixed media works on paper, photography, collage, glass, felt sculpture, and architectural interventions.
For nearly thirty years, Herrera has investigated and contaminated the complex histories of abstraction. His approach to material—as both subject and object—simultaneously reveals and conceals fragments of pop culture and found images within layers of shape, color, and line. The resulting compositions conjure multiple associations, creating an open-ended, charged exchange between artist, artwork, and viewer.
In addition to the rich plate section, this monograph includes a comprehensive exhibition history, essays by Valerie Smith and Scott Roben, and a conversation between Herrera and his good friend and fellow artist Josiah McElheny.
List of contents
"The Reflection of a Passing Car...," Valerie Smith
Plates
Conversation: Arturo Herrera with Josiah McElheny
"Out of Its Gaps" Scott Roben
Chronology
About the author
Arturo Herrera (b. 1959, Caracas, Venezuela) received a BFA from the University of Tulsa and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at SITE SANTA FE, Santa Fe, NM (2024); Supernova, Rome (2024); The Contemporary Dayton, OH (2023); Ruby City, San Antonio, TX (2022-23); and Feld-Haus Projects, Berlin (2022); and group shows
Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge, American Academy in Rome (2024);
Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room, London (2024); and
Monochrome Multitudes, the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2022). Herrera’s long-term, site-specific wall installations can be seen at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Bloomberg European Headquarters, London; and Tate Modern, London. His work is housed in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Tate Modern, London. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, ArtPace San Antonio, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and DAAD. Herrera lives and works in Berlin.
Valerie Smith is a curator, art historian, and writer living and working between Berlin and New York. She has curated and directed projects at Artists Space, Sonsbeek 93, the Queens Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Since 2014, she has been teaching exhibition histories at Barnard College, Columbia.
Josiah McElheny (b. 1966) is an artist whose sculptures, paintings, installations, performances, and films engage with the history of ideas across literature, architecture, music theory, and astronomy. His works often combine glass or mirror with other materials, to emphasize the importance of the act of looking “as a subject in and of itself.” For McElheny, a skilled glassblower, the material serves as a productive agent, inciting chance encounters between forms and ideas that point toward alternative histories and futures.
Scott Roben is an artist and writer living in Berlin. He has written about Arturo Herrera’s work on several prior occasions, including essays accompanying Herrera’s 2019 exhibition
Arturo Herrera at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago and his 2021 exhibition
From this Day Forward at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK.
Summary
The first monograph on Venezuelan multimedia artist Arturo Herrera in nearly twenty years, this comprehensive book takes a deep look at his diverse body of work.
Most known for collage, felt sculpture, and wall painting, Herrera references the complex legacy of abstraction using modernist visual languages. Often employing found material and sourced elements, Herrera’s work incorporates discrete iconography and familiar imagery to provoke a multiplicity of references and readings. As his practice has evolved, the artist has become renowned for his colorful abstract mixed-media pieces that adapt and renew techniques of fragmentation and layering found in his earlier collage-based work.
Foreword
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