ART CITIES: Seoul-Teresita Fernández

Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke watery realms, the exhibition “Liquid Horizon” extends Teresita Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes—soil horizons formed by geological and human-formed layers. Here, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency that expand the visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

“Liquid Horizon” marks Teresita Fernández’s debut at Lehmann Maupin’s Seoul location and her first exhibition in the city in over ten years. Extending a dialogue with her most recent presentations: “Soil Horizon” in New York and “Astral Sea” in London—this exhibition continues Fernández’s sustained exploration of landscape as both a material condition and a metaphorical field. For more than three decades, Fernández has probed the paradoxes and complexities of landscape—the visible and the concealed, the celestial and the terrestrial, the enduring and the ephemeral. Her work resists reductive depictions of place, instead revealing landscape as an embodied site: at once intimate and expansive, personal and collective, poetic and political. Within her practice, land and water are never neutral backdrops but charged terrains that hold layered histories, shifting identities, and cosmological significance. Rather than depicting literal geographies, Fernández’s “Stacked Landscapes”—including “Liquid Horizon 3” (2025)—operate as sculptural abstractions and metaphors for perception, memory, and the human condition. Aligning with the spirit of color field abstraction while extending its possibilities into sculpture, Fernández harnesses material resonance to summon emotional and psychological depth. Horizontal striations in charcoal, sand, and blue pigment, pressed into aluminum surfaces, evoke geological strata merging with aqueous expanses and contemplative states of being. The sensorial pull of these compositions recalls Mark Rothko’s luminous canvases, in which color itself becomes an agent of profound inquiry. At the foundation of each “Stacked Landscape”, fractured slabs of velvety charcoal anchor accumulations of black and blue sands, tactile and shifting like mutable terrains. These grounds dissolve upward into translucent veils of radiant blues—ranging from deep nocturnal hues to spectral, ethereal luminosities. The color fields seem to hover between immersion and emergence, as if suspended in a threshold where earth and sky, body and cosmos, converge. This merging of land and water functions as a point of origin and passage, suggesting both rootedness and migration. The rhythmic transitions between light and dark, absorption and reflection, summon a meditative awareness of temporality, displacement, and transcendence. Fernández’s long-standing interest in cartography also emerges here: maps understood not as fixed demarcations of land, but as fluid interrelations between islands, continents, and the surrounding waters that define them. A trembling line of electric blue—marking the seam between darkness and light, land and sea—draws the viewer’s attention to the fragile yet generative space of the unseen, what lies beyond perception. Water, in Fernández’s vision, becomes a horizon in its own right: layered, reflective, and inexhaustible. In dialogue with her “Astral Sea” series, also on view in the exhibition, water dissolves the binary between surface and depth, earth and sky, situating the viewer in a fluid continuum rather than a fixed point. This expanded horizon reframes spatial orientation, suggesting that every element—whether soil, sea, or sky—contains multitudes of memory, metaphor, and meaning. The glazed ceramic installation White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025) extends these inquiries in a different register. Composed of thousands of small ceramic cubes, the work forms a shifting matrix of color and light, its tonal gradient moving from pale, near-translucent hues at the center toward saturated depths at the edges. The field seems to expand and contract simultaneously, evoking the pull of a vortex or the glow of an astral body. Mineral glazes of cobalt and white swirl across the surface, invoking associations with geology, chemistry, and cosmic phenomena. The title itself—White Phosphorus/Cobalt—conjures a web of references, from natural mineralogy to the fraught histories of extraction, warfare, and environmental devastation. The repeating micro-forms echo fractals, strata, weather systems, and star fields, situating the work within an intimate–infinite dynamic that is as political as it is poetic. Also featured are nine solid graphite relief panels collectively titled “Nocturnal (Milk Sky)”. Rendered in luminous blue and soft white, the panels evoke the tidal rhythms of rising and falling seas. Polished graphite planes catch and reflect light against atmospheric fields of blue, generating a delicate interplay between reflection and opacity, land and sky, real and imagined. Graphite—mined from the earth and recurrent in Fernández’s oeuvre—anchors her inquiry into materiality and place. The subtitle “Milk Sky” invokes a dual resonance: the cosmic expanse of the Milky Way and the maternal associations between women, nurture, and the cosmos. Taken together, the works in Liquid Horizon form a meditation on the entanglement of land and water, perception and memory, body and cosmos. Through her precise and poetic manipulation of materials, Fernández dissolves conventional boundaries, offering landscapes that are not merely seen but felt—layered environments in which the past and present, the intimate and the infinite, intertwine.

Photo: Teresita Fernández, Liquid Horizon 4, 2025, Solid charcoal, sand, and mixed media on aluminum panel, 60 x 84 x 2 inches, 152.4 x 213.4 x 5.1 cm, © Teresita Fernández, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 213, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea, Duration: 27/8-25/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com