‘Other Octaves’ Curated by Jennie C. Jones featuring Carmen Herrera at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, United States

5 September 2025

Frome 5 September 2025 – 1 February 2026, Jennie C. Jones will curate an exhibition titled Other Octaves at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, which traces a loose network of figures working in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. These artists—including Carmen Herrera, Agnes Martin, Martin Puryear, Alma Thomas, and Mildred Thompson—are of personal significance to Jones and have served as touchstones throughout her career. She notes that “by following their paths, they added a disruption or a counterpoint to the main dialogues of their era.”

Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting was a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour: “My quest”, she said, “is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions” (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera created symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved away from biomorphism towards pure, geometric abstraction during her time in Paris in the later 1940s, she began making shaped, elliptical and tondo canvases, in addition to pioneering the use of solvent-based acrylic paints in post-war Europe.

Find out more via the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Image: Carmen Herrera, Pavanne (Green), 1967/2016, Acrylic and aluminium, 91.4 x 91.4 x 60.9 cm © Carmen Herrera. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.