Arturo Herrera

(Venezuelan, born 1959)

Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan visual artist, born in 1959, known for his melding of cartoons and collage. He lives and works between New York City and Berlin, Germany. Herrera received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Herrera’s work includes collage, works on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. Combining a Surrealist’s interest in the unconscious with a postmodern sensibility, Herrera creates evocative collage drawings that are distinctively psychically charged. These amorphous works are typically composed from cut fragments from children’s coloring books or comic illustrations, and often incorporate Disney characters and other recognizable cartoon icons. In A Knock Herrera uses his cut-and-paste technique to achieve a perfect balance between figuration and abstraction. For this work he has cut out fragments of figures based on the Disney characters Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from a collaged, candy-colored background. The disjointed figures are not immediately recognizable and only emerge from clues within the flowing, linear web of paper strips: a hand holding a candle, a pickax, the tassel of a cap, fragments of clothing, and pieces of arms and legs. Images that are normally considered innocent and innocuous are placed in illogical juxtapositions, resulting in a morphed entity composed of multiple body parts. Herrera has created a nightmarish world in which childhood innocence has been subsumed by the unconscious.

He is an internationally acclaimed artist and has received many awards including, among others, a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002).

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