Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan-born (1959), Berlin-based visual artist known for wide-ranging work that is rooted in the practice of collage. His colorful, often rhythmic art intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fragmentation, repetition, effacement, and dislocation. The resulting imagery often balances between abstraction and figuration (often barely legible), detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar. Critics suggest that this ambiguity engages memory, fantasy and a viewer's unconscious private interpretive schemes, evoking a multiplicity of references and readings. In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H. Merjian described Herrera's practice—which includes works on paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, public art and books—as "chameleonic as [it] is consistent," one that "breathes life into modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement."

Herrera has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Hammer Museum, and MoMA PS1. He has been recognized with Guggenheim and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowships and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artpace, among others. His work belongs to the public collections of museums including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid).