Pulse, Pause, Repeat

From 24 September, Lisson presents an exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture by Carmen Herrera, spanning the final decade of the artist’s life. Curated by art historian Marie Perennès, the display frames Herrera’s late works not as epilogues, but as the vital culmination of an eighty-year enquiry into line, form and colour. Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera studied as an architect in the 1930s before moving to New York in 1939 and training at the Art Students League in the early 1940s. From 1948 to 1953, she lived in Paris, where she shifted from the lyrical abstraction of her early paintings towards the ‘pure’ hard-edge style that became her art’s defining attribute. A direct contemporary of New York Schoolers such as Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, Herrera was one of the great unsung exponents of geometric abstraction, resolutely pursuing a sequence of spatial, colouristic concerns over multiple decades, before finally achieving widespread recognition in the 2010s – while still at the height of her powers.