Frieze Masters : Agustín Fernández

Agustín Fernández (b. 1928, Havana; d. 2006, New York) worked across painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, graphic design, and book production. His practice is situated between surrealist and postminimalist frameworks and is grounded in biomorphic forms, eroticism, violence, metaphysics, and the like. In his own words, Fernández depicted “objects from an unreal world of aggression and conflict, in which mechanical parts appear together with anatomical ones,” landing in “certain tormented zones.”

The artist first received classical training in Cuba, then went on to study at the Art Students League of New York in the late 1940s. At the beginning of the following decade he spent time in Madrid, auditing courses at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. A sense of exile cast a shadow across Fernández’s personal life and artistic practice, as he bounced from Europe to South America before establishing his final home base in the United States.

For the presentation at Frieze Masters, a selection of paintings and works on paper from the 1960s and 70s are on view. During these two decades, Fernández was particularly mobile. He landed in Paris in 1959 where he picked up elements of Surrealism, then moved onto Puerto Rico in 1968, which fueled an interest in hard-edge abstraction. By 1972, however, he settled in New York and became embedded in the punk fuelled subculture of downtown. This survey thus draws together images of collapsed space, bodily negotiations, and repeated geometries, all rendered in Fernández’s signature monochromatic style.

Exhibited extensively from the mid twentieth century through the present day, Fernández’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and Círculo de Bellas Artes, Maracaibo, Venezuela, among others.

- Reilly Davidson