CAMBRIDGE, UK.- Kettle’s Yard and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham are presenting, concurrently, the first major exhibitions in the UK of Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera, on view 31 March – 20 May 2007. The Cambridge exhibition provides a survey of his work comprising collage, painting, photography and sculpture. Characteristically it fuses references from art history with others derived from the realms of design and popular culture.

The exhibition includes a series of eighty ‘photographic abstractions’ which were made by reframing details from collages and drawings in the artist’s studio. Using the camera instead of the craft knife to cut and collage, this group of black and white photographs provides a key reference point for Herrera’s reflexive experiments with abstraction.

As well as using found images, usually from children’s books or cartoons, Herrera produces his own material for the collages, painting and drawing on hundreds of sheets of paper that are later cut and collaged into works where painted and printed marks are often difficult to tell apart. Blending the expressive drips and smears of action painting with the graphic language of children’s colouring books, Herrera confuses figurative and abstract references. Recognisable images are broken up to generate new meanings and expanded to draw on a wider set of associations. The resulting part-drawn, part-cut compositions hark back to the Surrealists and Dadaists’ psychologically charged juxtapositions.

On one level, Herrera’s work is simply and joyously about relationships between colour and form, line and space – in a redemptive, modernist sense – on another, his complex images reveal a post-modern reflexivity in their mixing of quotations, their fragmented engagement with visual culture, and the indefinite presence of the artist.

Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1959. He studied in the United States and currently lives and works in Berlin and New York. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. The Ikon Gallery exhibition runs from 28 March to 20 May.