Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera was born in 1959 in Caracas, Venezuela. He studied at the University of Tulsa before completing his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992. Since then, Herrera has developed an international career, with exhibitions across Europe, the United States, and Latin America. His work has been presented by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Center for the Arts, Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou, among many others. Herrera is known for moving fluidly across media—encompassing collage, drawing, sculpture, wall painting, and printmaking—while consistently exploring the space between recognition and abstraction.

Printmaking has long been an important part of Herrera’s artistic practice, not as a secondary medium but as a place for continual experimentation. He has worked extensively with etching, lithography, photogravure, and screen print often in collaboration with master printers. He treats print processes as a way to test image structures, layering techniques, and material transformations. Printed elements may appear as standalone works or as components of larger installations or collages. Across his printmaking projects, Herrera often pushes the boundaries of what a “print” can be by combining methods, altering plates, introducing hand-cut shapes, or integrating photographic sources.

Herrera’s imagery is wide in scope and cannot be reduced to a single motif or source. Over the years he has drawn from children’s book illustrations, cartoon characters, found photographs, geometric forms, gestural marks, and abstract color fields. He is particularly interested in what happens when images are fragmented, layered, or stripped of their original narrative. By cutting, obscuring, enlarging, or superimposing visual elements, Herrera creates works that oscillate between familiarity and ambiguity. This approach allows viewers to enter the work through their own associations, encountering each piece as a negotiation between what is seen, what is suggested, and what remains incomplete.