Magdalena Fernández

MAGDALENA FERNÁNDEZ ECOS

Jul 13, 2019 thru Jan 03, 2020

Magdalena Fernández (Caracas, 1964) is one of the most important artists in contemporary Latin American art. Her works based on video, installations, sculptures, and engravings consist of the exploration of two thematic axes: nature (and landscape) and the reinterpretation of an essential chapter of the history of art such as abstraction, of great strength and validity in many countries of Latin America, among which her native Venezuela stands out.

It is important to point out that abstraction in the artist’s work arises from her relationship with nature, as can be seen in several of her videos and in the poetic installation designed specifically for the Terrace of this Museum, on whose floor Puebla’s light and sky are reflected. Another part of her artistic production establishes a relationship with some significant names of the abstract-geometric genealogy. Many of the pieces selected for this exhibition represent a compendium of gestures, appropriations, and tributes that echo (hence the title of the exhibition) on forms, works, and ideas of artists such as A. G. Fronzoni, Agostino Bonalumi, Gego, Hélio Oiticica, Hércules Barsotti, Jesús Soto, Joaquín Torres-García, Kazimir Malevich, Lucio Fontana, Lygia Clark, Mercedes Pardo, and Piet Mondrian.

Thus, a set of pieces has been gathered where Magdalena Fernández broadens the experience of images and concepts of these paradigmatic modern artists. Seeing or participating in her works means experiencing them from a different sensibility. What in the majority of the works of abstract-geometric creators happens at the level of pure visibility, in Fernández’s installations and videos, occurs in a place marked by our presence in space and time. In this sense, the artist proposes to crystallize what for much of the abstraction of the last century was a utopia: to transfer to the body and the real and physical environment of the spectator what only happened in the retina, on the surface of the painting.

Magdalena Fernández. Ecos brings together works that have been done for more than a decade. These proposals lead the most relevant of her artistic production and assume a sort of selected chronology of her recent works. It is at the same time a sequence of “echoes” of her honored artists and, a personal history of abstraction from the artist’s sensitive and intelligent view.