“I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line, its beauty is what keeps me painting”
—Carmen Herrera
Motivated by an interest in form, space, colour, and a desire to find a new vocabulary to convey the modern age, the Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera frequently returned to the motif of green triangles bisecting white space. This abstract print, Blanco y verde, was originally conceived in 1960 as a diptych oil painting of the same title which now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Despite working alongside other notable post-war abstractionists and counting Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith as friends, Herrera’s work was overlooked throughout most of her career, largely due to the discrimination she faced as a woman and an immigrant. However, her work has enjoyed a notable rise in prominence in the past decade, with a major retrospective of her work taking place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. Blanco y verde represents a significant work in Herrera’s oeuvre which encompasses many of her key artistic concerns.
“My quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions”
—Carmen Herrera
