New York.- The Cuban painter Carmen Herrerawho achieved fame only when she was already an old woman, He died yesterday at his home in New York at the age of 106.as announced by the Lisson gallery that represented her.
“It is with immense sadness that we announce Carmen’s death (…) She died peacefully in her sleep in her New York studio-apartment where she lived and worked since 1967, most of that time with her husband Jesse Lowenthal, who also died in home in 2000,” writes the gallery in its obituary.
Herrera sold his first painting at the age of 90 and, despite having gone unnoticed for decades, his works hang in the MoMA in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington or in London’s Tate Galerie.
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Trained in her native Havana as an architect in the years 1938 and 39, she completed her artistic education in Paris, Rome and Berlin, cities where she experienced the emergence of the avant-garde, particularly in Paris, where she lived between 1948 and 1954.
In that year, he moved to New York, and befriended artists such as Mark Rothko and Barbara Hepworth, while developing his minimalist style of geometric abstraction, characterized by a very precise palette of only two or three colors in each composition.
“There is nothing I love more than a straight line, how can I explain it? It is truly the beginning of all structure (…) Someone told me one day that I will paint a point and I will have finished,” he once joked.
According to her gallery, Herrera was saved and condemned at the same time by her refusal to embrace any movement, even the one that was naturally closest to her, the minimalism of the seventies of the last century, “dominated by men”, because that rejection ” It left her free to experiment in her own way.”
The New York Times recalls today that Herrera “painted in the dark for decades”, in which she lived on the income of her husband, an English teacher, and highlights that her leap to true fame did not occur until 2004.
At the end of 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art dedicated a retrospective to her, the second individual exhibition achieved by the Cuban artist in a long career that began in the 1950s, after the one she starred in in 1984 in the now-defunct Alternative Museum.
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A week shy of her 102nd birthday, the artist then sold her painting “Verticals” at auction at Christie’s for more than double the anticipated $751,500, a testament to the fame she has achieved in recent years.
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