The Cuban-born, hard-edge painter and sculptor Carmen Herrera opens her first solo museum show in nearly two decades at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this week. Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (16 September-2 January 2017) features more than 50 paintings, drawings and wooden sculptures made between 1948 and 1978. Some of the works on view, including the paintings Field of Combat (1952) and To: P.M. (1967), have never been shown in a museum.
The show is split chronologically into three sections, beginning with paintings created from 1948 to 1958. Some of these were made during the artist's years in Paris, from 1948 to 1953, during which she developed her signature geometric colour-blocking style. Nearby is a display of nine works titled Blanco y Verde that were painted between 1959 and 1971, which leads to the final section of the exhibition, where the Days of Week series is displayed, comprising seven paintings from 1975-78.
The exhibition is organised by Dana Miller, the director of the Whitney's collection, in close collaboration with Herrera. Herrera’s last museum show was in 1998 on a smaller scale at El Museo del Barrio in New York, under the title The Black and White Paintings: 1951-1959. The current show will later travel to the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (4 February-16 April 2017).
