Skip to content

Teresita Fernández

Fire (America)

New York

Mar 17–May 20, 2017

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York

201 Chrystie St

New York, NY 10002

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Fire (America), an exhibition of new works by Teresita Fernández. The exhibition will debut a 16-foot glazed ceramic wall panel depicting a nocturnal landscape engulfed in flames, as well as a new series of abstract landscapes made from burned paper. In addition, Fernández will create an immersive, 100-foot panoramic drawing on site comprised of built-up, dimensional layers of solid charcoal applied directly to the gallery’s walls. Titled Charred Landscape (America), the installation will circumnavigate the gallery, surrounding visitors, and dissolving into the white walls.

Fernández is best known for her immersive installations and public projects that explore the various historical and psychological implications of the genre of landscape. In the Fire (America) series, Fernández uses images of fire to refer to contemporary American violence, as well as the technique of slash and burn used by indigenous people throughout the Americas to shape and cultivate the land. Contrary to the common fictitious narrative that the New World was a wilderness at the time of European contact, the technique of slash and burn evidences the sophisticated, deliberate ways that indigenous people had altered the land to their benefit for thousands of years. Fernández seeks to revise our notion of the “American landscape” and who gets to define it, as well as how notions of violence are defined. She is interested in visualizing erased, warped, and invisible narratives that are often omitted or deliberately obscured in our perception of what we think of as “American.”

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 4
Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Fire (America) 5, 2017

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Charred Landscape (America), 2017

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Charred Landscape (America) 1, 2017

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Charred Landscape (America) 2, 2017

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Charred Landscape (America) 3, 2017

Wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Burned Landscape (America) 1, 2017

Books and Editions

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

Fire (America) | Lehmann Maupin