It’s difficult not to be delighted, and a little bit awed, by Carmen Herrera’s (very) late-in-life artistic success. Now 101 years old, the Cuban artist studied in Paris as a teenager and spent a few years there after the war, and has been living and painting in New York since the 1950s. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Herrera started getting recognition for—and selling—her crisply painted geometric abstractions. Since then, she’s had a handful of solo gallery shows. The thirteen canvases on view at Lisson’s newly opened Chelsea gallery were all painted in the last two years. Each features exactly two colors, and many are diptychs or triptychs, though you have to look very closely to tell which of the paintings have more than one component. Some, like Blue and White (triptych) and Normandia, have a balanced geometry that gives the paintings a calming sense of stability, while others—Red and Blue (triptych) especially—are off-kilter to exactly the right degree to keep things interesting. —Leigh Anne Miller
Pictured: Carmen Herrera: Red and Blue (triptych), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 84 inches square. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo Leigh Anne Miller.