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Teresita Fernández

PAMM

Miami

Oct 18, 2019–Feb 9, 2020

Teresita Fernández at PAMM

The exhibition told the story of a creator who, through her practice, reflects and challenges perceptions of the natural world and the U.S. social order, and asked viewers to contemplate their roles with those spaces. The retrospective introduced visitors to the artist’s large-scale sculptures, installations, and mixed media works that merge formal and conceptual aspects of her practice through the use of natural materials and the historic genre of landscape to reinterpret relationships between nature, history, and identity.

Teresita Fernández: Elemental spanned the mid-1990s to the present, offering a comprehensive view of Fernández’s career to date. Featured works included Untitled (1997), a mirrored floor sculpture that references voyeurism but encourages self-reflection from those within the structure, and Fire (2005), which uses thousands of hand-dyed silk threads to construct flame patterns that become animated by light and air as viewers move around the sculpture.

Teresita Fernández at PAMM
Installation Views: 1 of 3
Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Fire(America) 3, 2016

Graphite panel by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Rise and Fall #23, 2017

Graphite panels by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Nocturnal (Cinematic Pour 3), 2009

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Teresita Fernández: Elemental

Film by Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2019

Teresita Fernández at PAMM
Installation Views: 1 of 3
Sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Viñales (Reclining Nude), 2015

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
Elemental | Lehmann Maupin