Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera – exhibits of collage artist at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis – Brief Article
Interview, April, 2001 by Neville Wakefield
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HERE’S A WORLD WHERE ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

Venezuelan-born artist Arturo Herrera comes to his particular brand of surrealism by way of cubist collage. Assembled from fragments of Disney cartoons and other sources of popular folklore, his early work was drawn with a scalpel. His cut and paste transformed comic strips into comic trips that had Pluto’s head disappearing up his ass or a seventh dwarf laid up in ways that might not have occurred to Snow White.

Still drawn to a perversely infantile universe where anything could happen, Herrera’s more recent work is more austere only in appearance. His current shows at the UCLA Hammer Museum (on view through May 6), The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (through May 6) and his ongoing installation at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York all include large murals. Diminished by the vast scale of these pieces, our own presence becomes that of a Lilliputian adventurer peeking into an illicit fun house.

Like the surrealists, Herrera is the master of taking his sinuous lines on strange walks. They loop in and out of dark forests to curve and pucker around knotty amorphous shapes that might equally be cuddly toys, mutant genitalia or huge floating turds. His knack may be in bringing the subconscious out of the woodwork, but the artistry is what keeps us guessing from whence it came.

Neville Wakefield is a writer living in New York.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group