Setting ideal for paintings, interactive work
The architecture of the Wexner Center for the Arts, with its quirky lines and geometric shapes and spaces, is beautifully matched with two new exhibits.
The hard-edged, brilliantcolored paintings of Carmen Herrera fill five galleries of the Ohio State University art center, and a mesmerizing architectural sculpture that invites viewers to touch occupies another gallery.
Herrera’s minimalism
In 2016, at the age of 101, Carmen Herrera was long overdue for a solo show. A retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City opened in September; it was the first solo show in decades for the Cuban-born American painter. The same exhibit, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” opened this month at the Wexner Center, its second and only other venue.
The 50 works, created between 1948 and 1978, include a few drawings and sculptures (which Herrera calls “structures”) and dozens of acrylic paintings that celebrate straight lines, bold juxtaposition of colors and minimalism.
For example, in “Friday” (1978), part of Herrera’s “Days of the Week” series, a thick, black zigzag shape separates blocks of orange. “Green and White” (1956), part of Herrera’s celebrated “Blanco y Verde” series, presents green triangular wedges separated by thin spears of white.
“Carmen’s works manage to say so much and have such a visceral and cerebral impact using very few tools,” said curator Dana Miller, who spearheaded the Whitney exhibit.
Herrera’s life story is as compelling as her art. Born in Havana in 1915, she studied art and architecture in Havana and Paris. In 1939, she married an American, Jesse Loewenthal, who championed her work.
They lived in Paris and New York together until his death in 2000. Through the decades, Herrera developed a distilled, geometric style of abstraction — pursuing a path not unlike that of renowned painters Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. But, Miller said, because she was a woman, an immigrant and an artist without a serious backer, she never attained the same critical attention as her groundbreaking peers.
Finally, in the early 2000s, after her work was included in several group shows and
private collectors started to buy her paintings, interest began to grow. Important institutions — including the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern — began to acquire her works for their collections.
The 2015 documentary “The 100 Years Show” (available on Netflix and playing continuously at the Wexner exhibit) documents Herrera’s life and work. Although now mostly confined to a wheelchair, she continues to paint with help from an assistant in her New York home and studio.