Just discovered Carmen Herrera via Netflix documentary. Wow! Love love LOVE her paintings, colors, shapes, everything feels like me. She says that painting flowers, nature, people etc. doesn’t interest her. Just shapes. And color. I feel the same.
But wait, there is more.
Not only the fact that she is 105 year old.
Not only the fact that she is still very active, painting every day. Very very inspiring. So, at my age, almost 70, (still don’t know how it happened, but it’s true), compared to her I feel like a baby.
It took her 90 years to get recognition.
Yup 90 years of no interest. She tells the story how a gallery owner told her straight in her face that he cannot exhibit her work, even though it is better than most of the pieces he displays, because she is a woman.
Recently, at age of 101, she got a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. And oh boy she deserved it long time ago. She was one of the pioneers of the hard edge school of painting, her experimental work is astonishing and yet only men from that period got attention.
