Happy 101st Birthday to Carmen Herrera!

Carmen Herrera has been in the public eye only for the past decade or so, especially as she turned 100 last year. She continues to enjoy her moment in the limelight. Lisson Gallery’s New York outpost has just opened (directly under the High Line at 504 West 24^th Street) with a show (now through June 11) honoring her uncompromising mastery of abstract, minimal and hard-edge forms “achieved through a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential”.

Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. She moved frequently between France and Cuba throughout the 1930s and 1940s, having started studying architecture at the Universidad de La Habana, (1938–39), and she training at the Art Students League, New York (1942–43). She settled in New York in 1954, where she continues to live and work today. 

“They say if you wait for the bus, the bus will come. I waited 98 years for the bus to come,” says painter Carmen Herrera in The 100 Years Show, a film documenting the life and practice of the centenarian artist (Click here for a preview).

We look forward to her upcoming exhibition organized by Dana Miller at The Whitney Museum of American Art, opening mid-September 2016!

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she comments to Deborah Sontag in an article for The New York Times. “I never in my life had any idea of money, and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

May 31, 2016….Happy Birthday to you, Ms. Herrera!!