Herrera, Carmen (1915--)

Carmen Herrera is a Cuban painter known for her pure geometric abstraction that emphasizes a stark rational order. In each work, she generally restricts her palette to a few contrasting colors or values to create a powerful sense of emphasis and order. In works such as Two Worlds (2011, private collection) and Yellow and Black (2010, private collection), she uses pure, unmixed pigments to accentuate solid shapes. She often paints variegated fields and crisp stripes of bold, flat color to arrange her compositions methodically. While her art has been understandably compared to that of American abstract artists such as Barnett Newman (who was, in fact, a close friend of Herrera’s) and Ellsworth Kelly, Herrera herself has stated that she owes her vibrant sense of color to the Cuban painter Amelia Peláez, who was known for her ebullient hues. In her own words, Herrera sees her own art as "a continuation of that of … Peláez, especially where colour is concerned" (qtd in Fuentes-Perez, Cruz-Taura, and Pau-Llosa 1987: 104). One cannot discount the impact of Herrera’s early training as an architect on her varied yet precise representation of shapes and structured arrangement of forms. The highly disciplined, almost ascetic nature of her compositions captures a concrete geometric order that emphasizes a rational sense of symmetry, asymmetry, and unity. According to Herrera herself, her optical and minimalist approach to form lies in her "quest … for the simplest of pictorial resolutions."

Geometric order parameters derived from the Voronoi tessellation show signatures of the jamming transition

Order parameters derived from the Voronoi tesselation show a clear signature of the jamming transition with power law scaling.

What a body can do

When I enter the apartment on the first floor in Berlin Schöneberg, where the Musée de la danse is announced to take place, Rabih Mroué welcomes me and the others visitors. At the very first room, I encounter a workshop situation in which Shelley Senter, former dancer with Trisha Brown (one of the icons of postmodern dance) tries to teach some phrases of Primary Group Accumulation, a piece from 1973, to Claire Bishop, art historian and critic of relational and participatory aesthetics. Both are lying on the floor, and we are joining them. Primary Group Accumulation was the third piece set by the mathematical structure of accumulation, following the principle of a children’s game: A, AB, ABC, ABCD—repeating and adding one new element of movement after each repetition. Four dancers performed rotations and bending of the joints in unison; the easier and more everyday it looks, the harder it is to execute the movement in exact unison, with the right timing. The piece precisely negotiates the tension between the relatively simple structure, the non-virtuosic movement, and its interpretation—between “geometric order and corporal imprecision.”

Doing Science in the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age

This chapter explores the ways in which categories of class and order have been built up into science in later prehistoric south-east Europe. Five themes related to scientific principles are explored: harmonious proportions and the geometry of buildings; an aesthetic of geometric order for the design of objects; numerology; calendrical observations; and the geometry of plaited patterns and woven structures. It is undesirable to separate the ritual from the domestic, the scientific from the technological or the pragmatic from the symbolic in the interpretation of the material culture under discussion. The author proposes that, under certain social conditions, there arose opportunities for more complex cognitive formulations than in the everyday formulation and use of the four main principles of object design—symmetry, precision, compartmentalisation and standardisation—found over a wide area of central and south-east Europe and covering four millennia.