Arturo Herrera

This publication coincides with the debut museum exhibition of this Venezuelan-born, New York-based artist, whose work explores our psychological relationship to visual narrative tropes. In his collages, photographs, sculptures and site-specific murals, Herrera employs figurative and spatial elements of cartoon and animated imagery to produce enigmatic associations that are at once profound and playful. Freudian bulges and folds are candy-coated in his Disney-stylized wall paintings, while in highly textural photographs the body and the landscape are revealed to be still, cryogenically frozen fields of the unknown. In addition to the superb photographic reproductions of Herrera's work from his 1998 exhibition at The Renaissance Society, this catalogue includes essays by Neville Wakefield, who considers the delightful and provocative subject matter of Herrera's work, and Maria Tatar, who explores the fabulous monsters lurking in his coloring book collages.