choice #1: Arturo Herrera
From Art 21:
“Being Latin American, you are made up of so many fragments from different cultures,” says Arturo Herrera. For the Venezuela-born artist, collage is the natural expression of his mixed identity. Herrera’s collages combine cartoon elements with abstract shapes to explore the interplay of childhood memories and adult desires.
In his Berlin studio, he photographs elements of his own drawings and then develops the film canisters in various liquids, which seep in and alter the film. “I think there is a potential for these images to communicate different things to different viewers in a very touching way,” he explains. “But that experience is not a public experience, it is very private, and very personal.”
Choice #2: Julie Mehretu
From art 21:
“Trying to figure out who I am and my work is trying to understand systems,” says Julie Mehretu, shown working with her assistants in Berlin on seven large canvases for a show at Deutsche Guggenheim. “The thing that keeps me going is the painting,” she says, “and in getting lost in doing that a language is invented.”
Mehretu’s abstract compositions reference modernist architecture, Google Maps, Coliseum-like buildings, and defaced structures. Mehretu is also shown working on the biggest project of her young career: a 21 by 85 foot long mural commissioned by a major financial institution in Lower Manhattan, to be completed during the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Characterizing the task before her as “absurd,” she wonders “can you actually make a picture…of the history of capitalist development?”