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Teresita Fernández

Maelstrom

New York

Nov 12, 2020–Jan 23, 2021

Ceiling work by Teresita Fernández

501 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Teresita Fernández, Maelstrom. This exhibition will feature a new series of monumental sculptures and installations that unapologetically visualize the enduring violence and devastation ignited by colonization. Focusing on the Caribbean archipelago, the first point of colonial contact in the Americas, Fernández challenges us to consider a more nuanced reading of people and place, one that looks beyond dominant, continental narratives and instead considers the region as emblematic of an expansive and decentralized state of mind. The artist conjures images of catastrophic weather and natural disasters as metaphors for centuries of injustice, U.S. military intervention, ecological destruction, and systemic oppression as a means of reflecting on the sociopolitical turmoil and abandon to which the region and its populations have been (and continue to be) subjected.

By evoking the generative forces of nature, Fernández implements a redemptive quality that counters reductive and exoticized clichés of the region often vulgarly associated with tropical paradise and leisure. Poignantly, the word Caribbean comes from the indigenous Táino (Arawak) word Carib, which means “human being.” This exhibition seeks to expose how the world’s wealth has been generated by the genocide of indigenous people, the enslaving of Africans via the Middle Passage, and the extraction of natural and human resources that grew out of this particular locus. Fernández subverts the way these islands exist in the dominant collective imagination—as small in physical scale and periphery—and instead proposes an immense and far-reaching diasporic matrix.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 6
Ceramic wall work by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Caribbean Cosmos, 2022

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Black Beach(Unpolished Diamond) 1, 2020

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Black Beach(Unpolished Diamond) 2, 2020

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Teresita Fernández: Maelstrom

November 2020

Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Black Beach(Unpolished Diamond) 3, 2020

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 5
Wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Archipelago(Cervix), 2020

Work on paper by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Puerto Rico (Burned) 3, 2018

Work on paper by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Puerto Rico (Burned) 4, 2018

Work on paper by Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández

Puerto Rico (Burned) 7, 2018

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
Maelstrom | Lehmann Maupin