Carmen Herrera valuation

Carmen Herrera (1915–2022) was born in Havana, Cuba. She studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in 1938 and 1939 and painting at the Art Students League in New York in 1942 and 1943. In 1948 she moved to Paris, where she showed five times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles between 1949 and 1953, and moved from biomorphic forms to geometric abstraction, painting shaped, elliptical and round canvases. After nearly five years in Paris she settled in New York. Her paintings are spare and hard-edged, built from crisp lines and flat planes of contrasting colour, often a single colour such as black or green against white, as in the series Blanco y Verde. From the mid-1960s she also made the Estructuras, wooden sculptural works for the wall, the floor and outdoor sites. In 2016 and 2017 the Whitney Museum of American Art gave her the survey Lines of Sight. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate and the National Gallery of Art, and Lisson Gallery exhibits it in London and New York.

From 2017 she made prints with Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE): lithographs, often issued as portfolios of three sheets, intaglio prints and aquatints with chine-collé. For a print, check the edition number, signature, publisher and paper, and that a portfolio is complete. Flat fields of colour show every scuff, crease and patch of fading, so condition matters. Unique paintings and Estructuras need the date and an invoice or exhibition history.