The Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera began employing a pure and minimalist approach to painting following a period working in Paris in the 1940s. Herrera's diptych, Portal (2014) is comprised of a crowned blackened space surrounded by a yellow field, suggestive of a symmetrically-mirrored entryway. Scaled to over 2-meters, the viewer's bodily relationship to the painting further aligns with the painting's title. Herrera paints the side margins of her canvases to extend the colors on the surface, treating the painting as a sculptural object. Her experiences living in Havana, Paris and New York produced a uniquely minimalist approach to geometric abstraction with crisp linework, intertwining art historical legacies in Latin America with European Constructivism and Concrete Art popularized by the Swiss artist Max Bill. Herrera explained in a 2012 statement, "my quest is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions."[1]