Arturo Herrera 1 Jun - 28 Jul 2012 11 Duke Street, St James's 3 Duke Street, St James's

Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new collages by Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera (b.1959). For his second solo exhibition in London, the artist has conceived a group of intensely complex collages fusing drawing, painting and photography. These are presented in serial form - including diptychs, works in four, eight, ten and twenty-eight panels. Herrera's visual language is unique, combining a number of idioms from expressionism to pop art.

Meticulously composed with printed and hand-painted paper fragments, the collages draw the eye to specific pictorial matter and then to the infinite variability and associative links between the constituent parts.

Herrera continues to mine a variety of popular and high-culture sources - (vintage colouring books, classical music programmes, museum postcards, flea market cookbooks, karate instruction manuals ) - and throws into question the legibility and resonance of flat abstract forms which have become universal graphic iconography. His juxtapositions charge the work with an element of surprise and what writer Graham Bader has previously referred to as 'a palimpsestual intensity'.

Suggesting a non-linear syntax, Herrera explores the formal and conceptual correspondences among the units of a single work and the whole, as well as across all of the works on show. In an attempt to re-define the connection between iconic images of popular culture and their pictorial disintegration, Herrera uses a fragmented language without eradicating the coded references inherent in the image. The works sit in an unstable ground between the explicit and the implicit.

Works from the same series are presented concurrently by Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago and by Sikkema Jenkins, New York. A catalogue, Arturo Herrera - Series has been published on the occasion of the exhibitions. It is distributed by Holzwarth Publications, Berlin.

Arturo Herrera lives and works in Berlin and has exhibited throughout the US and Europe in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His recent exhibitions have been at Ikon gallery, Birmingham, (2007), The Americas Society, NYC (2010), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2011). His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the world.