Lehmann Maupin is pleased to participate in TEFAF New York with an immersive, intimate installation of new work by Teresita Fernández. Comprised of four interconnected bodies of work, Night Vision, Night Watch, Nocturnal, and Lynched Land, the artist draws conceptual and material elements from past series together to create an installation that engages scale, the metaphysical, and the experiential in relation to the concept of “landscape.” For over two decades Fernández has created an expansive oeuvre that insists on a reevaluation of landscape and place to expose underlying history, culture, politics, and subject positioning. She has produced numerous monumental works around the globe that immerse viewers and challenge her audience to engage in conceptual wayfinding, including notable installations at Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan; Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA; Madison Square Park, New York, NY; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Sculpture Terrace at BAM, Brooklyn, NY.
Fernández has unapologetically confronted the genre of landscape painting through work that poetically merges historical narratives with material specificity, which is a critical and complex aspect of her practice. The raw materials Fernández uses are sourced from physical sites to create what she refers to as “stacked landscapes”—the notion that any place we occupy in fact consists of many social and historical layers, with the result that we are always occupying more than one place at once. Her expansive landscapes are simultaneously enigmatic, representational, cosmic, subterranean, and imagined, inviting viewers to experience the simultaneity of place as both timeless and as a subjective/ mutable social construct. The works featured in Fernández’s TEFAF presentation utilize lump charcoal, paper, and wood—all materials that come from trees—that are burned and manipulated to create an expansive vocabulary of textures and surfaces. A main feature of the installation is the wrap-around drawing of horizontal, magenta-colored lines drawn directly onto the dark gray fabric of the booth’s walls. This optically dynamic horizon line appears to pulsate with a rising and falling effect that also functions as the connective/conceptual thread surrounding the viewer, uniting the individual works in the presentation through repeated moments of deep red and magenta, with instances of neon pink that punctuate the darkness.