Magali Herrera

Magali Herrera was born in 1914 in Rivera, Uruguay^[2] to a notable local family.^[3] She was an autodidact who worked in a variety of media prior to creating the visual works for which she is known. She was a precocious writer of poems and stories, which were never published, and also wrote for several daily papers, working as a journalist. She enjoyed organizing poetry evenings and befriended well known Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou.^[4][3] She began painting intermittently in the early 1950s but it wasn't until 1965, after a period of severe depression, that she began to paint regularly.^[1] This activity became central to her existence with periods of intense creative work during which she would paint day and night. Depression, occasionally so intense that it resulted in suicide attempts, continued to plague her and in 1992 she took her own life.^[3]

Magali Herrera's work is primarily held in the Collection de l'Art Brut museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her works have been featured in Collection de l'Art Brut exhibitions including a 1996 retrospective^[5] and the Art Brut Biennial II: Architectures, in 2015^[6] for which an accompanying catalog of the exhibition Architecture: Art Brut the Collection, published by 5 Continents Editions, was produced^[7] A selection of her work was presented by Galerie Christian Berst ^[fr] at the 2010 Art Paris.^[5] In 2015 her work was included in the exhibition Le Cahier Dessiné at the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris.^[8] In 2025 the Museum Gugging in Austria presented an extensive exhibition with over 80 works of the Uruguayan artist and also featured her correspondence with Jean Dubuffet.^[9]