This exhibition focuses on Herrera's development as an artist in the decade following the mid 1980s. This early period is particularly notable for depicting forms suspended within the frame of a pictorial plain, a trait unique to this time. Herrera's work of the following decade, the 1990s, was an equally distinct moment in her career, marked not only for its rarity, as the last years with her husband, but as the first time she began to use shades of colours on top of each other: blue on blue, yellow on yellow, green on green. A series of drawings from the 1980s will be presented, illustrating how Herrera’s compositions take shape in different stages, setting out the lines and forms that determine the rhythm and spatial tension of her work. And while shape is integral, Herrera herself has explained, ‘colour is the essence of my painting’. Striking colour pairings range from the solid interlocking forms of Black & orange (1989) to more subtle tonal combinations, as evidenced in the tracked lines of Blues (1991) or Two Yellows (1992). ‘Shape, size and relative position, are called into question in each and every one of Herrera’s bi-coloured geometrical compositions’, writes curator Flavia Frigieri. The seeming symmetry of Herrera’s straight lines and angles is, on closer inspection, disrupted by a deliberate irregularity that renders her coloured planes as objects in themselves.
This new publication includes a critical text written by Flavia Frigeri, art historian and curator, further illuminating the progression of the second half of Herrera’s life work.
The Perimeter, 2021
Hardcover
300 x 215 mm
