“I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line; its beauty is what keeps me painting.”
I love this statement by Carmen Herrera. I feel a deep connection to it and understand her obsession. I had never heard of Herrera until a fellow artist friend saw some of my three-dimensional forms and suggested I look at her paintings. He noticed a similarity between my sculptural shapes and her painted geometry.
That conversation led me to the Whitney Museum’s 2016 exhibition book, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Through its detailed color plates and essays, I discovered her precise world of lines and color, and how a single shape could take on so many different lives.
The Whitney Museum gave Herrera her first major museum exhibition in 2016, when she was 101 years old. Overshadowed by her contemporaries for much of her seven-decade career, she simply kept painting. As Adam D. Weinberg writes in the foreword, “Being an artist is a commitment to the process of discovery, making, and invention. It is often a slow, confusing, difficult, and psychologically challenging endeavor. It takes tremendous grit, courage, and persistence, and the ability to sustain one’s efforts in the face of intense criticism—or worse, little or no recognition. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
Her paintings contain the essentials: geometry pared down to its most necessary components, color used not expressively but structurally, and a constant attention to balance. The work feels confident without being loud. It doesn’t require interpretation so much as it draws you in and asks you to slow down and look.
Here are a few paintings from her Blanco y Verde series. Herrera uses the same shape as a starting point, working through variation as color and placement become tools for testing balance and tension. The result is multiple outcomes from a single form.

Photo via: artnet

Photo via: Artsy

Photo via: artnet

Photo via: Whitney Museum
The same shape appears here as both an architectural drawing and a sculptural form, showing how Herrera moves between two and three dimensions.


Photo via: Lisson Gallery
Another aspect of her work I find especially interesting is how, in some works, Herrera uses two canvases for a single painting. The seam between them becomes part of the composition, subtly shifting how we perceive shape, space, and the painting as an object.

Photo via: Lisson Gallery

Photo via: Lisson Gallery

Photo via: Lisson Gallery
Another perceptual shift: from a distance, this work reads as two canvases. Up close, the division comes from a painted edge, subtly altering how we read the form.

Photo: Artforum

Here are few other of my favorites:

Photo via: Artforum

Photo via: Artsy

Unless noted, photos of paintings are from Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight.
I really love what she spent her life doing, and I’ve learned a lot from how she stayed committed to line. It’s amazing what she could do with such simple elements.
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References
Miller, Dana. Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016.
