Carmen Herrera's 'Estructura Verde' on view at LACMA

21 October 2021

Carmen Herrera's Estructura Verde is on view on LACMA's Smidt Welcome Plaza from 9 October until 13 February 2022. This presentation of her monumental work, which measures over seven feet tall, also marks the first ever presentation of her sculpture on the West Coast of the United States.

Estructura Verde is based on a simple geometric conceit: a rectangular form is cleaved into two L-shaped components (one a perfect right angle, the other irregular) through the simple excision of three narrow, triangular cuts. Initially rendered as an isometric drawing in 1966, the proposals to bring her works into the third dimension were not realised until the 2000s. Of all her works, Estructura Verde might document her evolution from painting to sculpture most clearly: fabricated in 2018, it takes her Blanco y Verde (1966–67)—one of a series of paintings on canvas in which thin wedges of colored paint break through flat expanses of white, whose form was later realized as a wall-mounted wood sculpture in 1971—and inverts the composition, allowing the work’s surroundings to emerge from the slivers of negative space between the two pieces of green metal.

Read more about the work on LACMA's Unframed blog and plan your visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art here.

Image: Installation photograph, Carmen Herrera's Estructura Verde, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Carmen Herrera, photo © Museum Associates / LACMA, by Brica Wilcox