Carmen Herrera, who sold her first painting at the age of 89, was mostly unknown and unseen until 2009, when a large-scale survey of her work opened in the U.K. and she was deemed "the find of a decade" by the Observer. Herrera's geometric, hard-edged abstract paintings, influenced by her university degree in architecture and singularly focused on the interactions of space and color, prefigure the Op Art and Minimalism of artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland. Herrera exhibited with Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, and Jean Arp in postwar Paris but could not gain a foothold after moving to the U.S. amid the peak of Abstract Expressionism. She was a close friend of Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman.