Teresita Fernández @ Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong

Teresita Fernández: Rise and Fall
Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong
October 26 – December 30, 2017

TERESITA FERNANDEZ

Rise and Fall #10, 2017 

Solid graphite and pencil on wood panel 

16 x 40 in, 40.6 x 101.6 cm. 

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Lehmann Maupin presents Rise and Fall, an immersive installation of recent works by Teresita Fernández. For the artist’s second Hong Kong exhibition, Teresita Fernández debuts 24 solid graphite and pencil landscapes as an immersive installation. The relief panels, depicting the rise and fall of the tide and shifting horizon lines, are densely arranged on graphite-colored walls where Fernández has extended the blue-hued images by drawing directly on the wall surface. The result is a site-specific installation with thousands of blue horizon lines that rise and fall, surrounding the viewer. The title of the show, Rise and Fall, is also a reference to how this term is used to describe the rhythm and swinging  pendulum of power and social movements throughout history.

Teresita Fernández has long questioned the traditional genre of landscape through abstracted interpretations of the land where history and materials mined from the ground are layered, becoming what she refers to as “stacked landscapes” that suggest being in more than one place at one time. Fernández often uses materials physically extracted from the topography they depict, creating experiential environments that disorient and complicate the idea of place by asking viewers to locate themselves both physically, historically, and metaphorically within the works. Large-scale projects such as her monumental Fata Morgana (2015) in New York City’s Madison Square Park, composed of a mirrored canopy that reflected and refracted the tens of thousands of pedestrians who traveled daily beneath the suspended artwork, demonstrate her unique approach to the genre. Fernández explains: “I’m interested in the idea that you are an extension of the landscape, that you are a part of it and it is a part of you. You look at the landscape, but it also looks back at you.”

Graphite has been elemental in Teresita Fernández’s practice. Her research on the history and origin of pencils led her to a graphite mine in Borrowdale, England, where the material was first discovered and mined in the 16th century. This rural site of subterranean raw graphite is the source from which pencils were historically first made, which crystallized the concept for Teresita Fernández of a drawing that is both dimensional material, actual place, and drawn image. Through her meticulous reconsideration of place and perception, both personal and cultural, Teresita Fernández leverages natural materials such as graphite to create works that reflect their own origins. This method of artmaking invites an expansive understanding of landscape, as well as the greater cultural and historic implications of depicting the natural world.

The work in Rise and Fall expands upon this premise, using raw graphite and pencil to create luminous scenes. The mountainous horizon separating water and sky is a reference to island geography, such as that of Hong Kong. The articulation of the landscape in this series appears dipped in a metallic liquid, an effect of the unadulterated graphite used by Teresita Fernández that is reminiscent of artist Robert Smithson’s Pour works, whom Fernández has cited as reference. In those works, Smithson used viscous materials like glue or concrete to cascade over a landscape, treating the earth itself as a canvas. Rise and Fall can thus be read within this art historical context as both landscape painting and land art, an amplifying of the term “landscape” that Fernández continues to explore.

TERESITA FERNANDEZ

Teresita Fernández (b. 1968, Miami, FL; lives in Brooklyn, NY) received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation fellow and the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts artist’s grant, an American Academy in Rome affiliated fellowship, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany biennial award. Appointed by President Obama, Teresita Fernández served from 2011-2014 on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel that advises the president, Congress, and governmental agencies on national matters of design and aesthetics. Fernández’s commissions include large site-specific installations at the Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan; the Seattle Art Museum for the Olympic Sculpture Park; Madison Square Park, NY; Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, CT; and Louis Vuitton, Shanghai and Paris. Teresita Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

LEHMANN MAUPIN HONG KONG
407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Marcia Marcus @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973"

Marcia Marcus 

Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

October 12 – December 2, 2017

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973. The exhibition constitutes a major re-examination of a portraitist who worked at the intersection of painting, proto-performance art, and identity politics. Marcus’ portraits, self-portraits, and group portraits – of artists, writers, family, friends, and acquaintances – show how portraiture sheds light on the shifting roles we all embody. Several paintings are on loan from museums and private collections. 

The works in this exhibition tell a story about a specific time—the 1960s and 70s.  Portraiture was performative for Marcia Marcus, apparent in the depictions of herself and her subjects in varying roles and guises, wearing bold, fashionable clothing and costumes.  Figures are orchestrated into stylish settings with suggestive patterning and embellishment: Marimekko-style floral design, gold and silver leafing, and collage elements.  The work reveals Marcus’ subversive playfulness as well as her unapologetic examination of female desire, race, and motherhood.

Marcia Marcus was raised in Upper Manhattan. The simplified architectural motifs that recur in her paintings, such as gilded archways, may be traced back to the formative memory of the Cloisters, built during her youth uptown. Marcus studied at the Art Students League with Edwin Dickinson, a teacher she adored and whose influence can be felt in the refinement of Marcus’ draftsmanship and tonal subtlety. At Cooper Union, where she studied in the early 1950s, her peers included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, with whom her work shares aesthetic and formal qualities.

By 1953, Marcia Marcus was collaborating with Allan Kaprow.  She was a founding member of the March Gallery where she had her first solo show in 1957.  Marcus was invited to be part the Delancey Street Museum by Red Grooms, along with collaborators Jay Milder and Bob Thompson. It was there, in February 1960, that she became the first woman artist to stage a “Happening,” and in April 1960, was the subject of a one-person show.

For over twenty-five years, beginning in 1952, Marcia Marcus spent summers living and working in one of the legendary Provincetown dune shacks on Cape Cod. Her close friend Lucas Samaras posed for a full-length portrait in the dunes, wearing only a small bathing suit, which she embellished with gold leafing.  Marcus worked from life — as opposed to photography — even on massive canvases outdoors.

Marcia Marcus’ self-portraits, in various guises, settings, and costumes, address the shifting roles that women can occupy throughout their lives. As an artist working in a Lower East Side loft, and supporting herself with Midtown office jobs, she was intimately familiar with how quickly one’s roles can shift. In this, her conceptual goals were ahead of their time, and can be compared to artists such as Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson. The experience of young motherhood was handled with a particularly inquisitive eye in Art and the Family (1966), in which Marcia Marcus divided the painting in half, inviting her two young daughters to paint their version of the family on one side. The other half is Marcus’ depiction of the family, with an elaborately collaged ground that includes news clippings with thematically relevant texts and images.

Marcia Marcus also addressed race prominently in her work.  She presented ethnic background and skin tone in a nuanced way, using ambiguous grayish tones — relatable to grisaille photography — to depict the flesh of her figures. Even her self-portraits vary in skin tone from painting to painting – suggesting, again, that one’s identity is fluid, rather than fixed.  Marcus’ selection of African-American friends and acquaintances as the subjects of numerous portraits is notable, considering the tense social climate and racial divisions of the late 1960s.  Renoir (1968) shows a young African-American friend of the family in a patterned midriff top and matching orange pants.  It becomes a statement about the history of heroic portraiture and who is represented.

Beginning in the 1960s, museums and universities across the country were actively acquiring Marcus’ work.  By the 1980s, Marcus’ visibility in the art world had ebbed, as she devoted more time to visiting professorships. This exhibition — the first major survey of her work in over thirty years — highlights her formal innovations and conceptual relevance today, re-introducing the work to a contemporary audience.

MARCIA MARCUS was born in New York City on January 11, 1928. She received her BA from New York University in 1947, and studied at the Cooper Union from 1950-52, and at the Art Students League in 1954. Marcus was awarded a Walter Gutman Fund award for travel to Florence in 1961 and a Fulbright Grant in 1962 to Paris. Her work was exhibited in New York by Alan Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, ACA Gallery, and Terry Dintenfass Gallery in the 1960s and 70s. She was the subject of a retrospective in 1984 organized by the Canton Art Institute, Canton, OH. Marcia Marcus also had a distinguished career as a professor, with teaching positions and visiting professorships at over 20 institutions, including the Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Iowa, Vassar College, and the University of California, Davis. Her paintings are currently in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH; and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, among many others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jessica Bell Brown.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

4 Great Jones Street, #4, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com