NEW YORK, NY.- Casey Kaplan announced representation of Patricia Fernández Carcedo.
Patricia Fernández Carcedo’s (b. 1980, Burgos, Spain) practice moves between painting, sculpture, and installation to recover and reconstruct a personal archive of materials. Within this framework, Fernández Carcedo situates her paintings alongside collected artifacts and hand-made objects from her inner world, including carved wood, bone, ceramics, letters, bronze pieces, and woodwork created by her late grandfather, José Luis Carcedo. His carvings are recouped and expanded upon by the artist as intricately etched frames for her soft-toned oil paintings. These tableaus of arches, spirals, fragments of the body, and self-referential furniture designs read as symbolic yet cryptic, as if belonging to a private cosmology—part relic, part hallucination.
Fernández Carcedo’s otherworlds break down narrative arcs of creation, hovering between inheritance and invention. Her most recent paintings envision non-linear spaces and timelines, offering minutely detailed staircases, ladders, and white filament paths to elsewhere. In works like Blue-print (2026) and to the bottom of the well (2026), a cochlear shape drifts through a dimensionless muted orange—this motif is the Bone Ship, a hypothetical vessel able to navigate between metaphysical realms. Reminiscent of a larger surrealist canon and the existential mythologies of artists like Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Fernández Carcedo’s shifting territories chart paths between the external material world and an inner imaginary world that embraces the centrality of care, relation, and change.
In one expression of these concerns, she recalls a childhood memory of watching her late grandfather methodically carve a distinctive “x-mark” into boxes and furniture she lived with around the home. Fernández Carcedo interprets this gesture as a form of handwriting, extending this pattern across her own carvings as an ever-expanding fractal that, in her words, brings “her antecedent’s mark into the future, continuing the transmission of histories, memories, and ideas that would otherwise remain forgotten.” Other materials hardened against decay— inlaid abalone, ebony, ceramic, and bone—join with walnut and pine to frame and contextualize the regenerative journey depicted in paint.
In one expression of these concerns, she recalls a childhood memory of watching her late grandfather methodically carve a distinctive “x-mark” into boxes and furniture she lived with around the home. Fernández Carcedo interprets this gesture as a form of handwriting, extending this pattern across her own carvings as an ever-expanding fractal that, in her words, brings “her antecedent’s mark into the future, continuing the transmission of histories, memories, and ideas that would otherwise remain forgotten.” Other materials hardened against decay— inlaid abalone, ebony, ceramic, and bone—join with walnut and pine to frame and contextualize the regenerative journey depicted in paint.
Many of Fernández Carcedo’s influences explore the concept of an alternative reality, including philosopher Federico Campagna, psychologists Dora Kalf and Carl Jung, and science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. These thinkers touch upon ideas of multiverse futures, embracing hybridity and the transient nature of existence as a form of human infinitude. Following suit, Fernández Carcedo’s artwork of speculative worlds is nevertheless anchored in handmade reality, earthside and in present tense.
Fernández Carcedo will present her inaugural solo exhibition in New York with Casey Kaplan in Fall 2027.
Patricia Fernández Carcedo received her BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002 and MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include A constellation of its other, Whistle, Seoul, Korea (2026); Box (a proposition for ten years), Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Cinco caminos de partida, Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Spain (2015). Selected group exhibitions include NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE-2020 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Strata, Obra, Malmö, Sweden (2017); and Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Fernández is a recipient of the City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project Grant (2023), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), and Pollock Krasner Grant (2017). She has participated in residencies at Centro de residencias artísticas (CRA), Matadero, Madrid, Spain (2026) AIR Sandnes, Norway (2024), and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2014), among others. Fernández’s work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She lives and works between Madrid, Spain and Los Angeles, CA.
