Arturo Herrera´s multilayered body of work includes collages, painted wood sculptures, photographs, cut felt pieces and wall works. Using a fragmented language – whose lingering references range from popular culture to art history – to decontextualize inherent narratives without eradicating the coded referentiality of the image. The resulting works shift in between the explicit and the implicit. A pliability of meaning is played out trough the ambiguity of figurative and abstract forms. These forms do not enforce a specific message. Instead, they address the fragmentation and recomposition of mass-cultural elements to explore the impact of the adultered language of abstraction into the collective gaze.
Herrera has received many awards including, among others, a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002).
