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Teresita Fernández, Félix González-Torres

The Crystal Stopper

New York

Mar 22–Apr 19, 1997

Installation view of The Crystal Stopper at Lehmann Maupin New York

39 Greene St

New York, NY 10013

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce the opening of a group show entitled The Crystal Stopper curated by Carlos Basualdo. The show includes the work of Teresita Fernández, Félix González-Torres, Dan Graham, Quisqueya Henríquez & Consuelo Castañeda, Alfredo Jaar, Sophie Tottie, and Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan. Weekly screenings on Thursday evenings of the film The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky will also be part of this exhibition.

The Crystal Stopper show was formed around the theme of the mirror and its place in contemporary identity formation. The mirror is a reflective surface which provides one with one's own image, and this reflected portrait serves as the model in identity formation. In this exhibition, the image is taken out of the mirror so that instead of one's self the mirror reflects the surrounding world.

Installation view of The Crystal Stopper at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 4
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
The Crystal Stopper | Lehmann Maupin