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Teresita Fernández

New York

Mar 29–Apr 28, 2007

Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

540 W 26th St

New York, NY 10001

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present a new series of work by Teresita Fernández. This exhibition continues to explore the artist's interest in opacity, transparency and the psychology of looking, with specific references to the Claude glass—an 18th-century painter's tool that contained a lustrous black mirror made of glass or obsidian and was used to view tonalities in landscape subjects. This is Fernández's first gallery exhibition since being awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2005.

Among the sculptures on view will be a ten-foot, shiny black mirror lying in what appears to be a bed of snow. This work considers landscape and the picturesque by placing the viewer in a shadowy reflection. The black glass is not a true mirror in that the reflections are duller, devoid of color and appear to be deeply set in an ink-like field, producing a darkly gorgeous, hypnotic effect.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 4
Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Longing (Double Portrait), 2007

Portrait of Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández's work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations. Her luminous, sculptural works poetically challenge ideas about land and landscape by amplifying the powerful, emotional connection in how we imagine place, and, by extension, one another. Fernández exposes the complex narratives that stem from distorted, colonial histories, elaborating on these themes in subtle ways that insist on intertwining beauty, the socio-political, the intimate, and the immense. Imagining the landscape with reciprocal sentience, Fernández has said “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you."

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Capital Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; an American Academy of Rome Fellowship (AFAAR); and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in Visual Arts, among others. Her works have been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Menil Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SITE Santa Fe; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Learn about the artist