Carmen Herrera Nieto

Carmen Herrera is a Cuban painter and sculptor. Her works have an almost spiritual precision. Her style is hard edge and her paintings are part of the geometric minimalist movement.

She was born in Havana, where her father was editor of the newspaper El Mundo and her mother was a reporter for the newspaper. She studied high school in Paris and enrolled in Architecture at a Cuban university. In 1939, she married Jesse Loewenthal and moved to New York. There she studied at the Art Students League. She and her husband settled in Paris a few years after World War II. There she joined a group of abstract artists, members of the Salon of New Realities, who exhibited their work alongside that of Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay among others.

However, when moving to New York, her geometric abstraction had no place as Abstract Expressionism prevailed. For decades, Herrera held sporadic solo exhibitions, including shows in a couple of museums (The Alternative Museum in 1984 and El Museo del Barrio in 1998).

Her work was recognized internationally when she was already older. After six decades devoted to painting, she sold her first work in 2004, when she was 89 years old. In July 2009, the IKON gallery in Birmingham, England, offered a retrospective exhibition of her work; an exhibition that moved to the Pfalzgallerie Museum in Kaiserslautern, from January 23 to May 2, 2010.

In 2016, she also had exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art and at the Lisson Gallery. Herrera has also had great success with her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

From September 6, 2016 to January 9, 2017, Herrera's works were exhibited in Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was her first exhibition in nearly two decades.

From May 3, 2016 to June 11, 2016, Herrera's works were exhibited at the Lisson Gallery in an exhibition titled Carmen Herrera: Recent Works. The exhibition featured 20 major paintings and one sculpture created during 2014-16. This exhibition was considered a tribute to Herrera, and also presented photographs of her studio and her New York apartment, where she has lived since 1954.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington have acquired works by her.

Carmen Ramos, curator of Latin American art at the Smithsonian, noted that "unlike many European artists who emigrated to the United States, Herrera, who has lived in the United States since her twenties, has rarely been identified as an American artist. Her recent success appears to be based on her Latin American status and ultimately obscures her visibility as an artist based in the United States."

Starting in 2014, Alison Klayman, director of the acclaimed Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, began working on a documentary about Herrera. The documentary, titled The 100 Years Show, premiered in 2015 at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. It was later released on Netflix and Vimeo on Demand on September 18, 2016.

The documentary "describes abstract minimalist pioneer Carmen Herrera as she enjoys the artistic success and fame that literally took a lifetime to happen." While focusing on her upcoming centennial, Klayman explores Herrera's education, her later years and her late rise to fame. The film generated largely positive reviews and further revitalized interest in Herrera's works.

In 2019, five colorful large pieces of aluminum with straight lines that were part of the exhibition, titled "Monumental Structures" were displayed in the heart of Manhattan.

Herrera is considered by critics a pioneer of Geometric Abstraction and Latin American Modernism.