Carmen Herrera
30
Works
Artist Spotlight
Carmen Herrera, A Century of Pure Vision
In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a long overdue retrospective for Carmen Herrera, bringing her razor sharp geometric canvases to the grandest possible stage in her adopted city of New York. The exhibition, titled Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, introduced her luminous hard edged abstractions to a new generation of collectors and curators who might have known her name only distantly. It was a triumphant cultural moment, one that confirmed what a small circle of devoted admirers had understood for decades: Herrera was among the most rigorous and original abstract painters of… Continue reading
Collectors
Artists in conversation
Ellsworth Kelly
Kelly shared Herrera's commitment to hard edged geometric abstraction using bold flat color fields on canvas. Both artists reduced composition to precise geometric forms and vibrant color contrasts with near identical visual economy.
Josef Albers
Albers pursued rigorous investigations into color relationships through geometric abstraction with the same systematic and architectural precision found in Herrera's work. His flat color compositions and minimalist sensibility align closely with Herrera's formal vocabulary.
Leon Polk Smith
Smith developed a bold hard edged geometric abstraction centered on biomorphic and angular color fields that closely parallels Herrera's approach to form and color contrast. Both worked in relative obscurity while producing work of significant formal clarity.
Artists who inspired them
Piet Mondrian
Mondrian's rigorous reduction of painting to geometric line and primary color provided a foundational model for Herrera's own architectural approach to abstraction. His De Stijl principles of order and visual harmony resonate directly in Herrera's geometric canvases.
Kazimir Malevich
Malevich's Suprematist exploration of pure geometric form and color as autonomous visual language deeply informed Herrera's belief in the expressive sufficiency of shape alone. His radical simplification of pictorial space echoes throughout her career.
Le Corbusier
Herrera studied architecture in Havana and Le Corbusier's Purist aesthetic blending architectural structure with bold color and geometric clarity shaped her pictorial thinking. His integration of form and color as functional and expressive tools directly parallels her painted compositions.