PARIS.- This exhibition presents paintings, collages and drawings by Agustin Fernandez, whose life follows an existential exploration that begins in Havana and takes him to Paris, Puerto Rico and then New York. His work, characterized by an enigmatic symbolism, cuts across figuration and abstraction, relentlessly questioning: “What is a body, a body in exile?”

His highly sculptural paintings invoke relief and invite touch, like the caress of a body unfolding onto a projection screen. Fernandez makes tangible physical and psychological tensions, the coexistence between pleasure and pain, animality and cerebral construction. The body becomes an arena for the battle between intimacy and societal taboos.

Forms interact, what is happening? The ambiguity of his work gives free rein to fantasy although Fernandez insists: “I am not an erotic but a metaphysical artist.”

This visionary work forecasts the mutation of man into flora, fauna and machine. A logic of opposites — erect and hollow, hard and soft, artificial and natural — characterizes his universe, which is inhabited by a mysterious life. Sex seems to ward off fate. What kind of species does this undifferentiated chaos announce?

His early work is characterized by the metamorphosis of an animistic cosmogony. In Paris, he paints with a soft violence and a subtle sensitivity, an anatomy of desire. But in New York his biomorphic universe moves into a biotechnological realm. In contrast to his friend Robert Mapplethorpe, Fernandez shows the mechanism of sublimation. His tight framing is reminiscent of the keyhole, the forbidden gaze.

Jeanette Zwingenberger, Exhibition Curator

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue

Fernandez was born in Havana, Cuba, on April 16, 1928 and died in New York City on June 2, 2006. He studied in Havana at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, San Alejandro (1946-1950) and in 1948, journeyed to New York for a summer course with George Grosz and Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League. In 1959, the Cuban Ministry of Education awarded him a scholarship to study painting in Europe. From that point onward he remained abroad, residing in Paris, France from 1959-1968; in Puerto Rico from 1968-1972; and New York City from 1972 until his death.

By the time Fernandez arrived in Europe at the age of thirty-one, in addition to a solo exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, he had also had eleven one-man shows that presented his work to audiences in Havana, New York, Madrid, Caracas, and Washington D.C. During the next four decades Fernandez went on to have more than 30 solo exhibitions in important galleries, museums, and art fairs around the world. In 1992, The Art Museum, Florida International University organized a major retrospective of his work, as does the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC in 2014.

In the course of his career Fernandez also participated in over 100 group shows throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America. The first of his more than 30 collective museum exhibitions was in 1959 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (where he showed again in 1966 and 1967) and the following year he was part of show held at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fernandez was also part of numerous important gallery projects including:Tanguy-Dali-Bellmer-Fernández-Roy, Galerie Andres-Francois Petit, Paris (1966), Latin America: New Paintings and Sculpture (Juan Downey, Agustín Fernández, Gego, Gabriel Morera), Center for Inter-American Relations, New York (1969), In Context: Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Jospeh Cornell, Agustín Fernández, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Carlos Merida, 123 Watts Gallery, New York (1998), Latin American Visionaries: Pedro Coronel, Agustín Fernández, Edgar Negret, Rene Portocarrero, Fernando De Szyszlo, and Lina Binkele, Anita Shapolsky, New York (2004), Cundo Bermúdez, Agustín Fernández, Emilio Sánchez, ACA Galleries, New York (2004).
Fernandez ’s work is in over two dozen public collections that include The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Snite Museum of Art, Indiana, The Círculo de Bellas Artes, Maracaibo, Venezuela; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba.