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Ikon presents the first major solo exhibition in the UK by American artist Arturo Herrera (b. Caracas, 1959, lives and works in New York and Berlin), including collage, sculpture, wall drawing and felt pieces.  For Ikon, Herrera will create his first ever animation piece, which will be projected across four gallery walls. Together with recent works it gives rise to a visually complex show, providing a detailed insight into the artist’s practice to date.

Herrera’s work contains a rich layering of associative meanings, stemming from a retrieval of popular childhood imagery mixed with elements of modernism, from abstraction to surrealism. These ambiguous pieces reference memory and recollection, a playful eroticism and develop new meaning through the collage process, creating hybrid images.  Recurring cartoon motifs of castles, dwarves and winding roads; some from Disney- all familiar yet abstracted, morph into painterly gesture. Yet unlike the accidental beauty of dripped paint inherent to ‘action painting’, the comparable shapes in Herrera’s work are formed by the meticulous cutting of paper and felt. This technique results in linear, abstract images of an enticing precision that beckon the viewer into fantastical landscapes.

Herrera’s animation, Les Noces is developed out of a characteristic fragmentation through cutting and splicing.  Photographic and drawn details from existing works are juxtaposed to create dense networks of painted, printed and cut-out paper comprising an ambitious collage animation in black and white. Set to Stravinsky’s Les Noces, from which the piece takes its name, in which modernist sensibility and rhythmic irregularity are underpinned by traditional Russian folk-song, this musical abstraction complements that of Herrera’s multi-layered graphic visuals.

Other works in the exhibition will include delicate paper cutouts; new large painted felt pieces and sculptures. An alluringly delicate wall drawing will be created on a large scale in the first floor galleries, using a traditional pin-prick and powder pigment technique to create a dusted ephemeral image that, despite its fluid nature incorporates a striking meticulousness. At the bottom of the wall, a bright powdery residue betrays the artistic process.

Arturo Herrera will be complemented by a parallel exhibition of photography and drawings at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Ikon gratefully acknowledges the support of the Goethe Institut. A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced to coincide with the two exhibitions, with commissioned essays by Dave Hickey, Juan Ledezma and Elizabeth Fisher.