"I like yellow and I like lines...[and] for me, black is all the colors somehow. The other colors are like a decoration."
—Carmen Herrera

 

 

 

 

A stunning mature work hailing from Carmen Herrera’s renowned oeuvre of geometric, minimalist paintings, Amarillo y Negro is an exemplary culmination of the artist’s lifelong path to perfecting her singular vision of hard-edge abstraction. Spanning six feet in length, the present work depicts a large, yellow form cutting through the center of the composition. Set against an expanse of pitch-black darkness, the razor-sharp zigzag at once appears fixed and floating in space, enveloping the viewer in a pulsing oscillation between figure and ground, color and line.

 

 

"The initial point of departure in my work is a process of organization that follows the dictates of reason...It is a process that must choose, among innumerable possibilities, the one that balances reason and visual execution."
—Carmen Herrera

 

 

Herrera’s rigorous practice of hard-edge abstraction developed between New York and Paris during the pinnacle of the 20^th century European and American avant-garde. Herrera moved to New York with her husband in 1939 and enrolled in the Art Students League, where she closely befriended Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Herrera recalled, “We spoke about the nature of abstraction, its very essence. Barney felt strongly that abstraction needed a mythological or religious basis; I, on the other hand, wanted something clearer, less romantic and dark.”ⁱ

 

 

 

 

This empirical sensibility carried through to her time in Paris from 1948 to 1953, when she began exhibiting alongside artists including Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Josef Albers at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Gravitating towards a more constructivist vocabulary, Herrera gradually stripped her paintings down to the essentials of geometry and color over the following decades, resulting in the formidable precision and arresting simplicity mastered in Amarillo y Negro.

 

 

"Color is the essence of my painting. What starts to happen to it as you reduce its numbers and come down to two colors, then there is a subtlety, an intensity in the way two colors relate to each other."
—Carmen Herrera

 

 

Despite facing the prevalence of Abstract Expressionism upon her return to New York in 1954, Herrera was resolute in refining her minimalist and rational aesthetic, working in relative isolation as an immigrant, female artist in a male-dominated art scene. As she continued to hone the structural and spatial articulations between simplified shapes and color, her investigations bloomed onto a monumental scale, allowing her the space to dissolve the distinction between color and form by making color her form.

 

 

 

 

Here, the sharp angles of the yellow block meet the black field in a perfect lock-in-key fit, their interlocking planes and chromatic intensity generating a sensorial Op-Art effect that belies the flatness of the composition. This visual tension stretches the field of vision in both the second and third dimensions, the two colors suggestively expanding beyond the edges of the canvas laterally whilst projecting back and forth into the viewer’s space in an illusionistic dance. “There is nothing I love more than to make a straight line. How can I explain it? It’s the beginning of all structures, really,” Herrera elucidates.ⁱⁱ “My quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    The acclaimed 2015 documentary, The 100 Years Show, played a major role in reinvigorating interest in the artist’s work, which culminated in the artist’s seminal Whitney retrospective, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, from 2016-2017.

•    Since her wide-spread institutional recognition, Herrera has had a number of public installations, including a major outdoor exhibition at New York’s City Hall Park organized by the Public Art Fund in 2019. Her works reside in numerous major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tate, London.

•    To date, Phillips has achieved 4 out of the artist’s top 5 records.

 

ⁱ Carmen Herrera, quoted in Alejandro Anreus, "Carmen Herrera in the Context of Modern Painting in Cuba," Carmen Herrera: The Black and White Paintings, exh. cat., El Museo del Barrio, New York, 1998, p. 18.
ⁱⁱ Carmen Herrera, quoted in Helena De Bertodano, “Carmen Herrera: ‘Is It a Dream?,’” The Telegraph, December 20, 2010, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Carmen Herrera, quoted in Estrellita B. Brodsky, “Ascetic Equation,” in Dorothy Feaver, ed., Carmen Herrera: Works on Paper, 2010-2012, exh. cat., Lisson Gallery, New York, 2013, p. 7.