Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is proud to present Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Arturo Herrera on view from November 29th, 2017 through January 20th, 2018.

Over the past 18 years, Herrera has developed a diverse body of work (most prominently collage, felt sculpture, and wall painting) that references the complex legacy of abstraction using modernist strategies of fragmentation, re-composition, and repetition, often employing found material and/or imagery from popular culture. For the current exhibition, Herrera applies these strategies to the painted canvas for the first time, free of the collage elements that were incorporated into several recent series. Combining and juxtaposing abstract sources, the paintings suggest a defined disorder - a restlessness filled with associative meanings. While a novel medium for Herrera, the paintings use a vocabulary that is familiar to the artist, from the abstract gestures present in his work since the 1990s to the complex layers of shapes, colors, and texture reminiscent of his well-known collage work. The paintings can be seen not so much as a departure, but an evolution in Herrera’s body of work.

Paintings marks Herrera’s seventh solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. since joining the gallery in 1998. Other recent solo exhibitions include Soave sia il vento at Galleria Franco Noero, Turin (2016); Day Before at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs (2015); and Faculty Band at Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2015). Herrera’s most recent site specific installations can be found at the Officine Grandi Riparazioni / OGR in Turin; Bloomberg European Headquarters in London; and at the West Elm building at 8366 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles in conjunction with the exhibition How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. In 2016, Tate Modern commissioned Herrera to create a long-term wall painting for the sixth-floor restaurant.

Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tulsa and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently lives and works in Berlin.