Magdalena Fernández

MAGDALENA FERNÁNDEZ
[1964, Venezuela]

Magdalena Fernández’s studies began in the fields of physics and mathematics; in 1982, she enrolled at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas. After two years at the university, she began exploring graphic design and traveled to Italy, where she studied with architect and designer A. G. Fronzoni. She worked as an independent graphic designer in Italy from 1990-2000. From this work, she developed a rigorous familiarity with line and structure. She began making stainless steel sculptures in the mid-1990s, anchoring them into the ground and inviting viewers to move in and around them. Her activation of the audience bears some relationship to the strong history of Venezuelan sculpture, especially to early interventions by Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fernández began using digital media to incorporate moving images into her work. She made a series of Dibujos móviles in 1998, followed soon after by a series of video installations called Pinturas móviles. In these, she referenced certain aspects of work by artists Piet Mondrian, Joaquín Torres-García, and Lygia Clark, along with Soto and Otero. However, she reinterpreted them, breaking down some of the authority of these canonical images and artists. There is, she argues, a dialectic of abstraction.

Indeed, many of Fernández’s abstractions look also to experience of the natural world. Using the organic forms of nature, Fernández adds sound and noises to playfully re-engage with how we experience these forms and how, by making them unstable, they can be transformed. “I believe instability deals with movement, with fracture, or with a possible transformation. Those thoughts have led to different formal results in my work, both in structural pieces and in videos. In fact, instability in my work is a physical event--an event that separates me from modernity,” she observes.

Fernández’s work has been shown in many solo exhibitions, including Rain: Magdalena Fernández at the Houston Cistern, Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston, Texas, USA (2017); Uprooting Architecture: Climas, IdeoBox Artspace, Miami, Florida, USA (2016);

2022
Magdalena Fernández, Clavijero Cultural Center, Morelia, Mexico

2021
Exhibición de catálogos “Ecos” y “Estructuras Elásticas,” Galería Carmen Araujo Arte, Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, Caracas, Venezuela

2019
Magdalena Fernández: Ecos, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico
Magdalena Fernández: Ecos, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico

2018
Estructuras Elásticas, Galería Carmen Araujo Arte, Caracas, Venezuela
Mares, instalación corporal, Teatro del Centro Cultural Chacao, Caracas, Venezuela

2017
Video Crossings: Magdalena Fernández, Phoenix Art Museum, AZ, USA
Magdalena Fernández: Flexible Structures, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX, USA

2016
Uprooting Architecture: Climas, ciclo. Arquitecturas del dessarraigo, IdeoBox Artspace, Miami, FL, USA
Magdalena Fernández, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2014
Magdalena Fernández, El dibujo fuera de Sí: Triptico de Venezuela (1970-2014), Instituto de Canarias Cabrera Pinto de la Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA

Centre d´Art Contemporain Frank Popper, Marcigny, France

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, FL, USA

Colección Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, Mexico City, Mexico

Colección Allegro, Caracas, Venezuela

Colección Cisneros, Caracas, Venezuela

Colección D.O.P., Caracas, Venezuela

Colección Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC), Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico

Colección Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Venezuela / USA 

Colección Sayago & Pardon, Los Angeles, CA, USA