Though the Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, who has died aged 106, spent 70 years refining her painting style into a severe yet seductive form of geometric abstraction, her pioneering work remained largely unrecognised by the art world until she was in her early 90s. From thereon, however, it received popular acclaim, with myriad museum exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s paintings and occasional forays into sculpture. Her work, she said in 2005, has been a “lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential”.
The artist was an early adopter of an aesthetic that has an affinity to American colour field painting, op art and Latin American neo-concretism. A typical Herrera painting does no more than balance two planes of contrasting colour across a large canvas. Each work in the Blanco y Verde series (1959-71), for example, is painted uniformly white in acrylic, bar the imposition of one or several green triangles, each with slight variations in acuteness, which stretch the width or length of the composition.
