1 June–28 July 2012
Opening: Thursday, 31 May, 6–8pm
Thomas Dane Gallery
3 & 11 Duke Street
St James’s, London SW1Y 6BN
Nearest tube: Green Park or Piccadilly
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10–6pm
Saturday 12–6pm
Admission is free
T +44 (0)20 7925 2505
info@thomasdane.com
Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new collages by Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera (b. 1959). For his second solo exhibition in London, the artist has conceived a group of intensely complex collages fusing drawing, painting, and photography. These are presented in serial form—including diptychs, works in four, eight, ten, and twenty-eight panels. Herrera’s visual language is unique, combining a number of idioms from Expressionism to Pop Art.
Meticulously composed with printed and hand-painted paper fragments, the collages draw the eye to specific pictorial matter and then to the infinite variability and associative links between the constituent parts.
Herrera continues to mine a variety of popular and high-culture sources—vintage colouring books, classical music programmes, museum postcards, flea market cookbooks, karate instruction manuals—and throws into question the legibility and resonance of flat abstract forms which have become universal graphic iconography. His juxtapositions charge the work with an element of surprise and what writer Graham Bader has previously referred to as ‘a palimpsestual intensity.’
Suggesting a non-linear syntax, Herrera explores the formal and conceptual correspondences among the units of a single work and the whole, as well as across all of the works on show. In an attempt to re-define the connection between iconic images of popular culture and their pictorial disintegration, Herrera uses a fragmented language without eradicating the coded references inherent in the image. The works sit in an unstable ground between the explicit and the implicit.
Works from the same series are presented concurrently by Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago and by Sikkema Jenkins, New York. A catalogue, Arturo Herrera – Series, has been published on the occasion of the exhibitions. It is distributed by Holzwarth Publications, Berlin.
Arturo Herrera lives and works in Berlin and has exhibited throughout the US and Europe in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His recent exhibitions have been at Ikon gallery, Birmingham (2007); The Americas Society, New York (2010); and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2011). His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the world.
Enquiries
Martine d’Anglejan
T +44 (0)20 7925 2505
martine@thomasdane.com
*Image above:
Arturo Herrera, 15 Stevens, 2012. Collage mixed media on paper (2 elements). 177.8 x 132 cm
(70 x 52 inches). Image courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Gunter Lepkowski.
