Art Lake City | In Plain Site | Visual Arts

Atentamenta una fresa’s Surreal Harlequins Pop Across Beehive Distilling

Atentamente una fresas mural at Beehive Distilling, 2245 S. West Temple (photos by Chiana Rossiter)

Her nom de plume should be your first hint that something a bit psychedelic is going on. Atentatmente una fresa (Mindfully a strawberry) is Mexican artist Aline Herrera’s professional moniker. It sounds a bit like a late ’60s psych band. Under it, she has decorated football equipment, musical instruments and skateboards, create murals large and small for more than a decade and exhibited her works in Mexico, Russia, France, Spain and the United States.

courtesy the artist

Her works can be both whimsical and melancholy, a mix that goes back to her childhood fascination with the Cirque de Soleil — “the harlequins, masks, acrobats and especially the mimes.” She says the mimes taught her how to juggle the range of her emotions, “from sadness to happiness, all with a touch of melancholy.” And in her works, her characters juggle themselves, long, spindly arms and legs wrapping around her compositions, while their spherical heads sprout vegetation or hide their emotions behind fanciful masks.

For the mural she created as part of South Salt Lake City’s 2022 Mural Fest, on the north side of Beehive Distilling, she worked with a reduced palette. Against a dark gray background, her figures are executed in white, outlined in black, and the whole is splashed with dashes of yellow, orange, green, pink and blue. “I wanted to balance a colorful composition with sober elegant black and white and gray,” she says. She makes ample use of the negative space of the building’s walls, allowing her figures to stretch across its wide expanse. “Painting in large scale is very fun because I get to improvise a lot and my characters can change all the time.”

(process images, courtesy the artist)

“Street Art is for sharing with the people, getting to know the community, hear their opinions and being part of a local thinking, so it was beautiful to share with all of the people who came by,” she says of her experience in Utah

The mural is located at Beehive Distilling, 2245 S. West Temple. You can view more of her work at atentamenteunafresa.com.

During the month of June we’ll be featuring articles on several murals and muralists in Utah. You can discover several for yourself by visiting our Art Lake City map.

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