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.