Arturo Herrera

www.pbs.org/art21/artists/herrera/index.html

"Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Herrera’s work includes collage, work on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. His work taps into the viewer’s unconscious, often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of fabric and pins the fabric to the wall so that it hangs like a tangled form resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Herrera’s wall paintings also meld recognizable imagery with abstraction, but on an environmental scale that he compares to the qualities of dance and music. Herrera has received many awards including, among others, a 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; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002)." (Biography: Art21)

Arturo Herrera's work epitomizes what I hope to achieve this year in my own work. His work overlaps mediums and creates it's own place in the world. He uses photographic images with collage, painting, and sculpture techniques.

I am looking at his work because he focuses on the topic I want to explore: the subconscious. In the previous post I talked about dreams and wanting to re-create them in artworks, but I also want to explore memory, recollection, disorders, etc which all fall into the larger category of the subconcious. I think that focusing on dreams is too specific and want to get to the base of my thinking because one needs a solid foundation to build upon. I feel that in my recent work my symbolism has been too literal and specific which in artwork feels amateur or immature. I really admire Herrera's ability to take these icons from childhood, disney characters, and re-contextualize them into something completely new. What I most admire about his work is that it almost becomes scientific like one of those ink blot tests hanging in a psychologists office. I thought that focusing on my dreams would lead me into uncovering why these images and symbols are haunting my thoughts. I think that these symbols my mind brings forth are clues or answers to questions I have not yet realized. I think that Herrera's work is the same in that it provides the viewer with an answer which will bring one to ask questions from their subconcious leading to a revelation. What I have learned and hope to achieve from Arturo Herrera, a revolutionary visionary, is the ability to take my work further while having it's own voice and have it be open enough so that viewers may obtain knowledge or ultimately have their own revelation.