The Gallery at Windsor is pleased to present A Piece of Waterfall in the Sound of Crickets, an expansive solo exhibition of work by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero. This exhibition, curated by Elena Ketelsen González, Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by DelMonico Books, including a foreword by The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, an essay by Ketelsen González, and an interview with the artist and Bernardo Mosqueira.

A Piece of Waterfall in the Sound of Crickets brings together a selection of recent paintings and monotypes by Herrero, who for over twenty years has produced a vast body of works on canvas, paper, walls, and streets, including many site-specific commissions and architectural interventions. The exhibition takes its name from a poem by celebrated Costa Rican poet Alfonso Chase (b. 1944), in which he reflects upon the mundane beauty of the sights and sounds of the country that has long inspired his poetry, despite frequent trips to New York City and Europe.

Like Chase, Herrero’s practice often looks beyond his surroundings but remains deeply situated in the lush urban setting of San José, Costa Rica, where he creates geometric abstractions that breathe outwards into the open structures of a city in flux or what Herrero calls “incomplete”, and beyond into the highly ordered cities of the North. From this context emerge works that achieve harmonic resolution while recalling the colors and contours of a city constantly transformed by tropical growth and decay.

Vivid colors merge to mirror overgrown terrains, while muted hues evoke sun-weathered buildings, as lines blur together to suggest a landscape view from above or the silhouette of a figure in motion. Triangles—both right-side up and upside down—conjure images of volcanoes or mountains. Shapes fall into each other to form precarious yet balanced compositions, reflecting an ever-changing topography, while newer paintings like Lost at Sea (2023) verge on the figurative, resembling a ferry crossing an expanse of ocean.

These paintings speak to Herrero’s profound connection to the territory he works from, in which he—and his studio—occupy the space where the human-made becomes entangled with the natural landscape. Together, the works in the exhibition demonstrate Herrero’s maturity as a painter who over two decades has made sensuous works that are rooted in a profound understanding of the interplay between color, form, intuition, and the place that spurs their creation.

I am delighted to welcome Federico Herrero to exhibit at Windsor. This exciting show follows our long-standing curatorial focus at The Gallery, which has presented a diverse roster of some of the world’s leading contemporary artists for more than two decades.

(The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, Windsor Cofounder and Creative Director of The Gallery at Windsor)

Federico Herrero was the recipient of the Young Artist’s Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). He has exhibited extensively in museums worldwide. Recent exhibitions include Tactiles, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Barreras Blandas, Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2020); Tempo aberto, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, São Paulo (2019); Open Envelope, Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2018); and Alphabet, a site-specific installation for the atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018).

His work is in the permanent collection of numerous institutions including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Tate Modern, London, UK; MUDAM, Luxembourg; MUSAC, Castilla y León, Spain; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil.

Elena Ketelsen González is a curator and writer based in Queens, New York, originally from San José, Costa Rica. She is currently an assistant curator at MoMA PS1, where she recently organized the first New York museum solo exhibition of Leslie Martinez (2023). Previously, she held programming positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of the City of New York. She was the founder of La Salita, a curatorial project dedicated to the investigation of artists working from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. She regularly writes for periodicals and museum catalogs and frequently presents and gives lectures at universities and other institutions.