Herrera, Arturo

Venezuelan, b. 1959

BiographyArturo Herrera is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with collage, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. His rhythmic, gestural sensibility is informed by the legacies of Modernism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, as they converge with inspirations of ballet and folklore. Balancing layered fragmentations, discrete iconography, and bold swatches of color, Herrera harnesses the fluidity of images by dislocating objects from their typical context to create entirely new associations. The open-ended ambiguity of Herrera’s work encourages viewers to reckon with aspects of memory, desire, and the encrypted unconscious.

Untitled (1997), in the Museum of Contemporary Photography collection, was exhibited alongside abstract black-and-white silkscreen prints, vibrantly colored wall paintings, plastic figurines, paper cut-outs, and small sculptures. This disparate and unlikely collection of objects is indicative of Herrera’s persistent interest in our psychological relationship to narrative and constructed interpretation. The landscape, taken along the outskirts of Chicago’s metropolis, stands in stark contrast to the rest of the exhibit. “Herrera’s forest marks a symbolic division,” Neville Wakefield wrote in 1998 for the Renaissance Society, “the transitional space between the conscious and unconscious.”

Herrera was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to the United States to attend college in 1978 receiving his BFA from University of Tulsa (1982) and his MFA from University of Illinois, Chicago (1992). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2005), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1998), Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (1995), and many others. His work appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; among others.