Spotlight Screening: Carmen Herrera 'The 100 Years Show'

11 May 2020

To celebrate the 105th birthday of Carmen Herrera coming up on 30 May, Lisson Gallery is pleased to share a documentary about her life and work, made in the lead up to a previous momentous milestone, her centenary in 2015. Directed by Alison Klayman, who previously made the film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show (2015) follows Herrera's working process and includes various interviews, featuring important contributions from Tony Bechara, Dana Miller, Olga Viso and Nicholas Logsdail. Herrera recalls her youth in Cuba, her coming of age in Europe, and her battle for recognition in the male-dominated art world of 1950s New York.

When asked to explain her paintings, she says: “If I could put those things in words, I wouldn’t do the painting. I would tell you. Usually artists are not the best people to talk about art. I think it’s a great mistake. You cannot talk about art—you have to art about art.”

The second season of Lisson Gallery's Spotlight Screenings is titled 'Documents/history/truth' and will showcase documentary-form films by and about our artists, as well as works that play on themes of tradition and historical fiction, mirroring how our cultural systems create alternate narratives.

Click here to watch the first of these films in full, until the end of the month.