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Teresita Fernández

New York

Apr 30–May 21, 2022

Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

501 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Lehmann Maupin’s presentation at TEFAF New York extends to the gallery’s 24th Street location in Chelsea, with a special installation of Teresita Fernández’s celebrated Viñales series, presented alongside one of her iconic charcoal installations. 

Inspired by the surreal rural landscape of the Viñales Valley in Cuba, the Viñales series embodies Fernández’s interest in combining earthly materials with a conceptual approach to place and image-making. In Viñales (Reclining Nude) (2015), a series of descending malachite and bronze forms sit atop a configuration of trapezoidal cast concrete structures that evoke the sprawling verdant landscape, suggesting the feminine forms of the valley’s mogotes, or rolling hills, as a reclining feminine body. Here, Fernández’s choice of materials evokes the artist’s concept of the “stacked landscape”: the malachite used here comes from the actual landscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is used to create another imagined landscape inspired by Cuba’s Viñales Valley, revealing the historic, cultural, and violent colonial connections between Africa and Cuba. The layered meanings (physical, conceptual, historical) associated with the raw materials and multiple place references emphasize the notion that we are always in more than one place simultaneously.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 2
Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Viñales (Reclining Nude), 2015

Graphite wall installation by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Twins (Mirror Image), 2019

Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Viñales(Chasm), 2021-2022

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