[4][26][27] After graduating, he traveled in Europe before moving to New York, where he began collecting coloring books, comics and illustrated fairy tales as "encyclopedias" of imagery that he cut into scraps of biomorphic forms to be collaged.

[9][5][7] Several critics contend that he connects those movements to conceptual art through tendencies in his work—toward absence, omission and a minimum of referential cues—that test the expectations of media (painting, sculpture, collage, book) and representational systems.

[11][42][37] Herrera's early work centered on small, handcrafted series of collages in which he cut, layered and intertwined fragments from coloring books, advertisements, cartoons and fairy tales with painterly marks and abstract shapes.

[31][9][8] These images were often bizarre hybrids: Donald Duck's lower torso morphing into a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar in a coloring book landscape; an upside-down, scribbled-over Tweety seeing a teddy bear flattened by a Wonder Bread wrapper and a phallus-shaped cutout.

[4] New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Herrera's "Desire" collages (Drawing Center, 1994): "polymorphously perverse and sweet, they seem to come from the hand of a child still too naive to disguise the depths of his own aggression.

(2012)—Herrera borrowed more widely from the legacies of abstraction and modern dance, superimposing shapes, squiggles and dense color fields that recalled work by John Baldessari, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock onto cartoon and other found imagery.

[26][2][6][44] The seventy-five large, closely hung "Boy and Dwarf" collages presented a dialectical experience of containment and exploration, suggesting both portals and a tangled "forest" of painted, sprayed, stenciled and pasted-on color.

[45][46] The moving-image work Les Noces (The Wedding) (Americas Society, 2011) featured static, black-and-white montages of abstract imagery based on 80 photographs Herrera shot of cut-up scraps in his studio, which changed rapidly to the rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-cantata of the same title.

[27][51][49] Herrera's wall paintings—the first for an outdoor billboard in Chicago in 1994—were seamless, hard-edged works combining appealing colors and rhythmic dances of repetitive abstract forms and vernacular imagery vaguely suggesting fantasy or narrative.

[9] Early works ranged from explicitly figurative and overtly sexual—the black contour-lined outdoor Out of Twenty-four (MCA Chicago, 1995)—to the largely abstract: the indoor Tale (Randolph Street Gallery, 1995), a continuous, varied torrent of cartoony orange blobs, billowings and curvilinear shapes.

[53][54][3][55] Herrera's large felt sculptures—first produced in 1998—suggested tactile, emblems of "heroic" Abstract Expressionist paintings with incised shapes resembling drips and splatters, while simultaneously deflating that movement with a pinned, slightly sagging appearance implying a fall from grace.

[11][42] The show included a 208-page book from a series of fifty-six unique exemplars, composed of uprooted, found pages from diverse publications that were overprinted with black shapes and outlines obscuring, disrupting and recasting the original images.