Each of the ten works in the suite of prints “Berlin Singers” features a 1950s photograph of a different Berlin singing star originally published in in the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s librettos (printed booklets which contained the text of an opera). However, layers of collage obstruct the singers’ faces, making them very difficult to find. To create these images, Arturo Herrera explored a variety of mark-marking techniques—from crayon, marker, and pencil drawing to acrylic painting and tea staining—on impressions made from found copper plates, stained and scratched from previous use. The artist screenprinted each work with a line drawing in transparent ink and added one or two pieces of additional collage as a final step. The outcome of Herrera’s laborious process is a series of fractured, stratified portraits that recontexualizes its subjects.

Label from Arturo Herrera: Little Bits of Modernism, December 12, 2014–April 5, 2015