Lehmann Maupin is honored to open it’s fall season in Hong Kong with the first solo show in China of acclaimed American artist Teresita Fernández, whose conceptual, experiential works are often characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking.
Inspired by the landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references, Fernández presents a range of new works that collectively demonstrate her remarkable ability to transform a multitude of materials and the surrounding architecture into unique perceptual experiences.
New drawings made with India ink on reflective chromed panel from the series Golden, which includes a large-scale triptych measuring more than three and a half meters, continue Fernández’s inquiries into materiality and mining, traditional landscape painting and the cultural significance of gold. The transparent ink marks and the mirror-like golden surface of the drawings play with the painterly convention of figure-in-the-landscape by superimposing the viewer's distorted reflection into the image. The scenes become like gestural film stills or cinematic panoramas. Golden relates closely to a sculptural installation the artist recently completed in Shanghai, titled Yellow Mountains. Made entirely of gold chains and pyrite ("Fool's Gold"), Yellow Mountains is an inverted topographical sculpture that refers to Huangshan, the mountain range that has inspired countless poems and paintings throughout Chinese history.
The exhibition delves further into the artist’s exploration of opacity and transparency with a group of wall pieces that are comprised of hundreds of small convex glass mirrors and polished black onyx cabochons, which specifically makes reference to the Claude glass—an 18th-century painter’s tool that contained a lustrous black mirror made of glass or obsidian used to view tonalities in landscape subjects. Among the works on view, both dark and light reflective surfaces create portraits of extreme opposites.
Image: © Teresita Fernández, Lehmann Maupin
