Arturo Herrera
Artist and UIC Alumnus
Monday, Januray 28, 2008
Co-sponsored with the Open Practice Committee of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, and the Smart Museum of Art

Fragmenting, combining and splicing images found in coloring books, cartoons and fairy tales, Herrera’s forms provocatively mine the viewer’s unconscious to unleash dark psychological spaces. The artworks, crafted across a variety of media including collage, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and wall hangings, recontextualize the source material to be purposely open-ended and elide clear borders. In this manner, Herrera investigates the history of modernist abstraction in which questions of the violence of figuration, subjectivity and recollection are fruitfully engaged in a beautifully terrifying exchange.

Herrera’s selected solo exhibitions include the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, among others. Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. He received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the winner of many awards including a DAAD Fellowship. His work will appear in the exhibition Adaptation, on view at the Smart Museum of Art January 31 through May 4, 2008.