“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” Herrera told The Times in 2009.
Carmen Herrera (1915–2022), an artist of Cuban origin, spent her formative years between Havana, Paris, and New York, where she developed her signature geometric abstraction. Herrera’s hard-edged compositions, often defined by the meticulous use of two or three selective colors, reveal a profound understanding of form and space. Despite working alongside the Abstract Expressionist movement, her work remained distinct in its distilled simplicity and meditative precision, gaining widespread recognition only later in life at the age of eighty-nine. “I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she told The Times in 2009.