The Armory Show

The Armory Show

María Fernanda Cardoso

Booth 127 | Javits Center | New York, NY

September 9-12, 2021

Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce our participation in The Armory Show 2021, presenting a solo exhibition of works by María Fernanda Cardoso [b. 1963, Colombia/Lives in Australia]. The exhibition will feature five large-scale photographs of the Australian Maratus or "peacock spider," from a recent continuation of Cardoso's Spiders of Paradise: Actual Size series which she began in 2014.

"If paradise were to exist, all its spiders would be artists. They would sing, dance, and make beautiful pictures. The Actual Size series features the colorful courtship displays of minuscule Australian jumping spiders. They are surely the world’s smallest artists. Magnified hundreds of times their own size, we perceive all the magnificent colors, diverse structures, and mesmerizing patterns that the males have perfected to seduce their hard-to-get females." - María Fernanda Cardoso

Throughout her career, Cardoso has explored nature and its links to culture and science. In the early 1980s, Cardoso studied architecture and the visual arts at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In 1987, she moved to New York to attend the Graduate Sculpture Program at Pratt Institute, and in 1990, she completed her MFA in Sculpture at Yale University. Cardoso's early projects make use of preserved animals such as lizards, starfish, earthworms, frogs, and snakes arranged in intricate, abstract compositions reminiscent of pre-Colombian forms. In 2003, she represented Colombia in the 50th Venice Biennale. In recent years, she has created large-scale installations integrating architecture with nature, for public spaces including Sydney's Green Square urban renewal project. Cardoso moved to Sydney, Australia in 1997 where she currently lives and works. In 2012, she received her PhD from Sydney College for the Arts.