Arturo Herrera (online show): From This Day Forward

Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, he currently lives and works in Berlin. Over the last 20 years, Arturo Herrera has developed an internationally celebrated, multi-layered body of work—from collages, felt sculpture, public commissions, and wall paintings. His work often references the conflicted legacy of abstraction, utilising the modernist strategies of fragmentation and repetition. This becomes most noticeable with the use of found material and iconographic imagery from popular culture that meld into complex shapes, textures and colour palettes in his paintings and collages. Occupying the connection between legibility, figuration and abstraction, Herrera’s practice is notable for synthesising ready-made images and collage into ambiguous contexts. The layering of a non-linear narrative referencing contemporary images and modernism creates work that hovers between the explicit and implicit.

Herrera mines a wide variety of pictorial matter and niche source material—vintage colouring books, classical music programmes, museum postcards, flea market cookbooks, karate instruction manuals—and throws into question the legibility of flat abstract forms which have become universal iconography. This dislocation arises from the tension between specifically constructed images and the inability to fully reconcile the known with the unknown. As Herrera says: “For this reason, animated films and illustrations have been a rich source for my work. Their stylized, graphic qualities communicate the familiar in an effortless and immediate way that can also be pushed quickly into abstraction through fragmentation … my temporary painting and sculptural interventions in pre-existing architecture have utilized the tension between scale and the painted image to physically address the viewer in public spaces.”