Arturo Herrera
May 29–July 25, 2025

This exhibition features a selection of cut-felt collages and a monumental wall painting in the gallery’s main space. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, May 29, from 6–8pm.

Arturo Herrera’s multimedia work engages the legacies of Modernism through the visual strategies of fragmentation, repetition, and reconstruction. “A divided body is richer and more complex than the whole figure,” he explains. His bold, layered compositions revel in the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed, and the mutability of images within different pictorial contexts. Painterly gestures and found imagery adjoin and overlap with flat abstraction and gaps in color, while the ghosted vestiges of bodily figures hint at a familiar presence. Like pauses in a piece of music, the intentional creation of space amongst forms becomes its own unit of meaning. This constant, active dialogue between ambiguity and legibility foregrounds the inherent relational concerns of Herrera’s practice: how the internal relationships between visual forms can provoke new and unexpected associations, emotions, and insights.

In his recent body of cut-out felt collages, Herrera continues to explore the essential nature of negative spaces when reading a work. These large-scale works are composed of a dense network of matte felt overlaid upon an acrylic or collaged abstraction. The apertures created by the felt fragments paradoxically expose the larger work concealed beneath, which cannot ever be experienced in its totality. It is precisely this dependent relationship between the opaque felt cut-outs and the underlying compositions that energize the works in a reciprocal manner.

Moving through the exhibition, a large monochromatic painting sets in motion the entire south wall of the main gallery, continuing the dynamic interplay between positive and negative spaces. In these massive abstract fields, the wall itself—the painting’s canvas—becomes integrated within the composition, dissolving and reappearing amongst a tangle of form and void. The painted shapes are echoed in the felt pieces and vice versa, activating the entire site and foregrounding the experience of personal encounter as each viewer moves and positions themselves in relation to the works in space.

Learn more here.

Arturo Herrera: Works 1992-2024

The pull of Herrera’s work is grounded in its interweaving of formal elements—contour, color, gesture—with the cultural specificity of the materials from which his objects are made.

— Scott Roben, “Themselves, In Motion”

The first monograph on Venezuelan multimedia artist Arturo Herrera in nearly twenty years, this comprehensive book offers a deep look at his diverse body of work. The publication highlights the breadth of Herrera’s practice, showcasing painting, mixed media works on paper, photography, collage, glass, felt sculpture, and architectural interventions.

For over three decades, Herrera has investigated and contaminated the complex histories of abstraction. His approach to material—as both subject and object—simultaneously reveals and conceals fragments of pop culture and found images within layers of shape, color, and line. The resulting compositions conjure multiple associations, creating an open-ended, charged exchange between artist, artwork, and viewer.

In addition to the rich plate section, this monograph includes a comprehensive exhibition history, essays by Valerie Smith and Scott Roben, and a conversation between Herrera and his good friend and fellow artist Josiah McElheny.

Learn more and order your copy here.