Arturo Herrera

The Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea is proud to present Arturo Herrera's first European survey exhibition. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, and now living in Berlin, Arturo Herrera interweaves elements from Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and the visual language of popular culture in order to construct works that are full of associative meanings and lingering references.

He uses different procedures in his work, such as painting, drawing, photography or sculpture, although recently he has based his last works on paper using collages and drawings. His images are shaped with cuts or drawings from Disney images, which he fragments, articulates and relates with complete freedom. The spectator participates of this free association in works such as Almost Home, a diptych made for Internet, which can be modified by the spectator. Herrera plays with the concepts of what is perceived and remembered, looking for a new childhood in grown-ups through all those images used by all of us in our youth. The free interpretation and the unconsciousness of the spectator take part in this game. Among his last exhibitions is important to mention the one he made in UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles or the one at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Genebre, Sweden.

Arturo Herrera's multilayered body of work includes photographs, collages, painted wood sculptures, cut felt pieces and large wall paintings. The artist often uses a fragmented language—ranging from animated films to art history—to decontextualize inherent narratives without eradicating the coded referentiality of the image.

The resulting works are hybrids that exist between the explicit and the implicit, appealing to transgressive impulses of the unconscious. Herrera's works contradict expected readings to create a liminal space between disorder and order, where aesthetics and ambiguity rule and resonate.

Arturo Herrera's exhibition at CGAC will show collages ans paintings recently done, works especially created for the Centre, and two wall paintings one of them especially created for the exhibiiton room where it will be shown. A fully illustrated trilingual catalogue with two critic essays will accompany the exhibition.

Arturo Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela. Solo and project-based exhibitions of his work have been held at Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the ICA Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of America Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, and the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, as well as on the website of the Dia Art Foundation. He is the recipient of fellowships from YADDO, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artpace, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, and DAAD in Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Pressetext

Arturo Herrera
Kurator: Miguel Fernandez-Cid
Koordinator: Maria do Ceu Baptista