Arturo Herrera
Crush (2019)
Born in Venezuela and based in Berlin, Arturo Herrera is a virtuoso of color and abstraction whose choice of media ranges from wall paintings to works on paper to painted books, among other formats, almost all of which operate in the seemingly infinitesimal microlayers of the two-dimensional. The flatness of his chosen supports offers Herrera a site for carving and cutting into spaces, building, and re-building, in lyrical friezes packed with energetic contours and silhouettes. The tension within each of his compositions is staggering: a palimpsest of outlines and colored configurations that pulsate with life, vibrating in unison like the multiple sections of a well-tuned orchestra. For this edition, Herrera created an offset print from one of his large-scale paintings with his trademark weave of lines, colors, and open structures. Over the offset print, he then silkscreened a large red form in gouache, which sits playfully atop the frenzied composition that is the picture’s ground, echoing its restless grammar of lines and outlines and providing another plane that reflects it. Here, Herrera deftly positions the two-dimensional image as both surface and support, making both identities equally alive and urgent.
4 Color Offset print and silkscreened Gouache on paper, 46.6 x 35.5 cm, edition: 100 + 30 A.P., Unique, numbered and signed on the front, € 350.- plus shipping.