February 25, 2010
Carmen Herrera in the Palatinate Gallery Kaiserslautern, Artnet
Carmen Herrera: Painting and Drawing from 1948 to 2007 “- Of 23 January to 2 May 2010
By JÖRG SCHELLER – The Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern is a unique construct. Founded in 1874 as an industrial museum, houses the Museum now has a very heterogeneous - and extremely heterogeneous presented - a collection of mostly European graphics, paintings, sculptures and artifacts of the 19th to 21 Century. Inside the building, the visitor encounters a lively architectural Holterdipolter: stone floor in the entrance hall, carpet in the temporary exhibition, linoleum on the first floor, second floor, and a veritable smorgasbord of lighting equipment anywhere. The house will be determined by an insoluble tension between the seemingly improvised rooms of temporary exhibitions and the state-of-the-art museum architecture in the permanent collection. One may smile, and certainly one could make more of this quaint museum. Alone, is a place like the Pfalzgalerie not perfect to present the abstract expressionism, without glorifying him?
The first solo exhibition of US-Cuban artist Carmen Herrera in a German museum Kaiserslautern currently represents an impressive attention to themselves. Herrera, born in 1915 in Cuba, lives after a stay in Paris (1948 to 1953) ever since 1954 in New York and is one of the less acclaimed artists from the male-dominated environment to Barnett Newman, The spiritus rector of the postwar American abstract art. The Palatine Gallery is spread over two floors, 55 paintings, drawings and sculptures from seven decades of Herrera’s see: (stresses simple, focused and in the rest Border Crossings between the expressiveness of color and geometric abstraction, with occasional hints of surrealismLes Lieux # 29, 1948), cubism (Chromatic Discourse, 1948) and Informal (Conquete de l’Air # 10, 1950). The paintings can be so clear in the genealogy of European-influenced modernism situate, now grab biomorphic forms à la Jean Arp on to recall now Poliakoff organic color-pulsing arrangements - but never heated and they vibrate like Robert Delaunay Fenêtres. With few exceptions, Herrera checked into the art itself fragmented and nested parts, careful, controlled. In some ways it’s early work is already an epitaph or at least a tribute to the heyday of the so-called Ecole de Paris: At precisely the time when Herrera there at the moment, the star sinks in Paris and New York makes a final on the capital of the arts.
Looking at the Palatine issue inevitably raises a different impact than in faraway temples show of Abstract Expressionism, such as the Villa Panza in Varese (Italy), where works by Ford Beckman, Phil Sims or Max Cole The pact between the infinite possibilities of the capital and the infinite openness of abstraction seal. In Kaiserslautern, the works have to survive in an environment of self-ironic distancing themselves resisted: here is a stain and alteration marks on the wall, since a crack in the plaster, papierverhangene window over here, over a cheeky outlet near the screen - constantly urges the heteronomous environment from the autonomous self in the art world. This is a good thing. The Palatine Gallery is related to the purist abstraction, like Socrates of Athens: both sit as a salutary sting in the flesh of course. Once willingly, even unwillingly.
Of course, it is also Herrera itself, which confirms the impression that one has to do with one of the friendlier and less dogmatic representatives of abstraction. Although characterized primarily her late work by a formal rigor, inferior to the Hard Edge, Color Field Painting and racially related to nothing. But in contrast to people like Clyfford Still, Ellsworth Kelly Frank Stella or succumb to the aforementioned Barnett Newman Herrera at least not to the temptations of the monumental. Their formats include rarely more than a half square meter. One might call this a minimalist “visual chamber music” and distinguish it from the great symphonies purist incurred specifically for the museum.
While Newman, but also artists such as European origin Piet Mondrian her abstract paintings in the glorified tension between self-evidence and consecrations higher spiritual settled, there is much more sober Herrera. The comparison of their picture book with her friend Newman illustrates das Newman provided his paintings are often pregnant with meaning, murmuring titles such as Onement (1948), Cathedra (1951), Vir Heroicus sublimis (1951) or Voice of Fire (1967). He also wrote grandiloquent manifestoes like “The Sublime Is Now” (1948), which still showed significant influences of European classical modernism, who wanted the New York neo-avant-garde actually handle. Although Herrera also makes occasional detour into metaphysical realms when their formalist compositions are titles such as Epiphany (1971), while the gesture Newman’schen remains bound. But most of her work is characterized by a pragmatic-curious interest in color, form, structure and tectonics, which may perhaps be due to their initial training as an architect.
In her paintings of the 1950s and early 1940s, Herrera-year hard-edge attacks ahead though, radicalized their style is not. Comparable Wassily Kandinsky she feels her way through various degrees of mimesis initially approached to hard on the border with the geometrical abstract painting. Then only the image surface moves, rather than indulge in an apologia for the total purism, which too often ends in an aesthetic snobbery. Also sometimes the objectivity flashes in the nonobjective, such as A City (1948), which evoke the sharp triangular and rectangular shapes an urban skyline, or Green Garden (1950), with its tangled, more organic forms. Nachgerade sympathetic regardless of muting in this context, smaller deposits clichéd as the painting Iberic (1948-1952), comes along in the bullfighter’s moderate black, red and orange - Olé!
Herrera is certainly one of the surprising and positive (re) discoveries of this year. The Palatine Gallery is fully in trend. Gallery owners, curators and the artists themselves are increasingly looking to an older generation of artists, who was the deserved attention until now, failed: You think of Carol Rama, Channa Horwitz or the hundred-designer Janette Laverrière. It would be cynical to speak of a fashion phenomenon. Rather, it seems, as found in the Pacific now but instead of a small revision of the male-dominated art history. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of stresses of the catalog that Herrera “national and gender excludes” instead, consistently and confidently on the position of the islander insists: “I am a painter, who plans to paint a picture.”
http://www.artnet.de/magazine/reviews/scheller/scheller02-26-10.asp