Carmen Herrera - Evening & Day Editions London Wednesday, January 18, 2023 | Phillips
  • “I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line, its beauty is what keeps me painting”
    —Carmen Herrera

    Motivated by an interest in form, space, colour, and a desire to find a new vocabulary to convey the modern age, the Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera frequently returned to the motif of green triangles bisecting white space. This abstract print, Blanco y verde, was originally conceived in 1960 as a diptych oil painting of the same title which now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Despite working alongside other notable post-war abstractionists and counting Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith as friends, Herrera’s work was overlooked throughout most of her career, largely due to the discrimination she faced as a woman and an immigrant. However, her work has enjoyed a notable rise in prominence in the past decade, with a major retrospective of her work taking place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. Blanco y verde represents a significant work in Herrera’s oeuvre which encompasses many of her key artistic concerns.

    “My quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions”
    —Carmen Herrera

     

     

    • Artist Biography

      Carmen Herrera

      Cuban / American • 1915

      At the age of 101, Carmen Herrera is finally receiving long-deserved recognition for her arresting, hard-edge geometric compositions. Born in Cuba in 1915, Herrera has spent most of her life outside the island, permanently settling in New York in the mid-1950s. Herrera was formally trained as an architect at the Universidad de la Habana, and later completed studies at the Art Students League in New York from 1943 to 1945. During this time she became acquainted with key figures of postwar abstraction including Barnett Newman, whose work undoubtedly influenced Herrera's minimalist aesthetic.

      Herrera's work is chiefly concerned with formal simplicity and experimentation with bold color. Through the use of sharp lines and stark color contrasts, she creates dynamic and technically sophisticated compositions that reflect movement, balance and symmetry.

      View More Works

172

Blanco y verde (White and Green)

1960/2010
Screenprint in colours, on wove paper, the full sheet.
S. 40 x 79.3 cm (15 3/4 x 31 1/4 in.)
Signed in black ink, titled, dated and numbered 'HC I/II' (all printed) on the label affixed to the reverse (an hors commerce impression, the edition was 30 and 4 artist's proofs), published by Edition 5x6x9, Berlin, unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£3,000 - 5,000 

Sold for £8,820

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Evening & Day Editions

London Auction 18 - 19 January 2023