ART-PRESENTATION: Teresita Fernández-Rise and Fall
Teresita Fernández is best known for her public installations and experiential large-scale sculptures that evoke striking landscapes. Her work, often inspired by natural wonders, invites an individualized experience of the work and the space it occupies. Fernández places particular importance in her choice of medium, playing with the limitations of materials and employing those such as gold, graphite, and other minerals that have complicated histories often tied to colonialism.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
For her solo exhibition “Rise and Fall” Teresita Fernández debuts landscapes as an immersive installation at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. It’s the artist’s second exhibition in Hong Kong. In her landscape paintings on view the very idea of landscape transcends to a spatial zone installing the landscape within the venue to physically transform the place. Fernández’ works have always questioned the traditional genre of landscape with her paintings that interpret through abstraction the land where history and materials are mined from the ground and thus are layered, becoming “stacked landscapes”. For the exhibition Fernández debuts her recent works of 24 solid graphite and pencil landscapes to shaper her immersive installation. The relief panels depicts the rise and fall of the illustrated tide, as the title goes, and shapes the shifting horizon lines which are densely arranged on the graphite-colored walls. On the wall itself Fernandez has extended the blue-hued images of her works by drawing directly onto the surface of the wall. The result of her unusual vision upon the graphite wall is spectacular and creates a unique site-specific installation with her hand drawn horizons created with thousands of blue horizon lines rising, falling and surrounding the viewer. It’s a drawing that extends itself to the spatial curves taking the visitors within its artistic curvature. The artist quotes the title of the exhibition, “Rise and Fall” in shaping the reference to how the term has been used historically to demonstrate the rhythm of the swinging pendulum of power in the backdrop of social movements throughout history. Her works suggest a space that is beyond the boundary of now, being in more than one place at one time.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong, Duration: 26/10-1/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
