Agustín Fernández drawings exhibition opens at the Frost Art Museum

Cuban-American artist Agustín Fernández (1928-2006) ranks as one of Surrealism’s most discerning interpreters, and is considered to be one of the masters of modern Cuban art. This exhibition, done in collaboration with the Snite Museum of the University of Notre Dame, presents drawings from the late 1960s to the 1990s that provide a comprehensive overview of his most recognizable imagery, a visual language instilled with the erotic of desire and vulnerability.

“This exhibition marks our attempt to introduce his works on paper as key elements of his impressive career that have not previously been explored in depth, and help establish his role not only in the arts of Latin America, but within the mainstream of international Modernism of the twentieth century,” says Dr. Carol Damian, Director of the Frost Art Museum.

"Although the works on paper have often been included in exhibitions as complements to the paintings and to reveal the extraordinary artistic technique that is basic to every media he mastered, this is the first exhibit dedicated solely to works on paper. These works are done with graphite, some with minimal color. The space at the Frost allows for a beautiful installation that will give visitors a new perspective on his mastery of the drawing media on a grand scale.”

“Form’s Transgressions: The Drawings of Agustín Fernández” will run through February 17, 2013, and is part of the Frost Art Museum’s 2013 year-long program, Commemorating 500 Years 1513-2013 Spain-Florida-Caribbean, a series of exhibitions celebrating the evolution of our regional culture and development since Ponce de León’s arrival in what is now Florida.

The curator Pau-Llosa wrote the following text about the exhibition:

“The work of Agustín Fernández (1928-2006) embodies a high-point in the development of Cuban art in our time A prominent member of the third generation of Modernists on the island who were born in the 1920’s and early 30’s and which emerged in a period of unprecedented cultural and economic growth on the island during the 1950’s, Fernández and other masters of his generation—among them, Agustín Cárdenas, Hugo Consuegra, Antonia Eiriz, Gay García, Guido Llinás, Rolando López Dirube, and Eugenio Rodríguez—synthesized the aesthetic concerns of the previous two generations while shedding the regional allusions and imagery which characterized their work. A majority of this breakthrough generation’s masters went into exile after the communist takeover in 1959. Soon after, Fernández left Cuba, living the rest of his life in France, Puerto Rico, and New York”.

“Fernández took the fusion of eros and violence first heralded in the rapturous landscapes and figures of Cuban Modernist pioneer Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957) but played out this intersection of themes in sculpturally conceived painted images where flesh, machine, armor, lace, blades, and orifices converge metonymically. His guiding trope, metonymy, transfers values between adjacent or simultaneously conceived referents. Hence, it is the cognitive structure which evokes temporality, action, and narrative, but which when compressed into images free of surrounding context becomes the more compacted and atemporal trope of metaphor. In Fernández’s work, both these tropes work in tandem”.

“Form’s Transgressions: The Drawings of Agustín Fernández” is the first survey of Fernández’s works on paper, a facet which was largely overshadowed by the impact and success of his works on canvas”.