Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

Blanco y Verde is part of a series of compositions in white and green that Carmen Herrera made from 1959 to 1971. The broad expanses of white in these paintings seem to extend to the surrounding walls; the green triangles thus appear to be cuts into space. In diptychs such as this one, the seam between the canvases presents another division. Here the union of forms and surfaces conveys a structural tension that pushes beyond Herrera’s investigation of line and color to probe the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space.