Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon
Lehmann Maupin, Seoul
August 27 – October 25, 2025
Lehmann Maupin presents Liquid Horizon, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Teresita Fernández, on view at Lehmann Maupin Seou. Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke watery realms, the exhibition extends Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes—soil horizons formed by geological and human-formed layers. Here, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency that expand the visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial.
Liquid Horizon marks Fernández’s debut at the gallery’s Seoul location and her first exhibition in the city in over a decade. The exhibition proliferates the dialogue with her most recent exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin: Soil Horizon in New York and Astral Sea in London. It is preceded by two recent museum exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas and at SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which both investigate the vibratory, interdependent nature of terrestrial and cosmic matter—treating landscape not simply as physical terrain but as a charged space of psychological, political, and cultural resonance. Concurrently, Fernández’s work is on view in the exhibition Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum in New York.
For over three decades, Teresita Fernández has examined the complexities and paradoxes within landscape—the visible and hidden, celestial and earthly, fierce and alluring, material and ephemeral, ancient and contemporary. Her material intellect is firmly embedded within the sculptural investigations that question how place, land, and landscape are defined. Her work reveals landscapes as embodied sites—at once vast and intimate, private and collective—where poetics and politics intertwine, exposing the layered histories, identities, and cosmologies contained within their strata.
Rather than depicting literal geographies, Fernández’s “Stacked Landscapes”—such as Liquid Horizon 3 (2025)—function as sculptural abstractions and metaphors for perception and the human condition. In keeping with the tenets of color field abstraction, albeit sculpturally, Fernández is deeply engaged with material resonance and its capacity to evoke emotional and psychological depth. Composed of relief horizontal striations in charcoal, sand, and blue pigments on aluminum, these works suggest geological formations that merge with aqueous realms and introspective states. This affective quality recalls Mark Rothko’s compositions—his softly divided, luminous fields of color that emerge from profound emotional inquiry. At the base of each “Stacked Landscape” are crackled slabs of velvety charcoal, anchoring layers of black and blue sand that accumulate like shifting, tactile terrains. These strata transition into vivid, translucent veils of blue, ranging from saturated nocturnal depths to spectral, radiant luminosity. The color moves between immersion and emergence, suggesting a space suspended between the terrestrial and the celestial.
The merging of land and water in the “Stacked Landscapes” serves as a critical point of observation, suggesting both origin and passage—a threshold where interior and exterior conditions converge. Rhythmic transitions between light and dark and between reflection and absorption evoke a meditative awareness of history, migration, and otherworldliness. These works also extend Fernández’s ongoing engagement with maps, which consider land, islands, and continents inseparable from the surrounding waters and spaces. A thin, quivering line of electric blue marks the magnified, abstracted boundary between land and water, darkness and light, underscoring the quiet intimacy Teresita Fernández renders with subtle precision. In this fragile seam, she draws our attention to the unseen—what lies beyond immediate perception.
Water—like soil—is treated as a kind of horizon. It contains its own layered depths and reflective surfaces, embodying an “as above, so below” duality that reframes spatial orientation. In Fernández’s recent Astral Sea series, on view in the gallery, water is a central element. Water absorbs and mirrors, dissolving the boundary between surface and depth, earth and sky, rooting the viewer in a fluid, shifting field rather than a fixed location. This expanded notion of the horizon recurs throughout the exhibition in varied forms. For Teresita Fernández, any single element contains multitudes. Metaphor and memory operate as equal counterparts in her evolving conception of landscape.
The glazed ceramic installation White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025) echoes the chromatic depth and surface sensitivity of the “Stacked Landscapes” yet diverges in both structure and scale. Composed of thousands of small ceramic cubes, the work forms a shifting matrix of light and color saturation, moving from pale tones at the center to deeper hues at the edges. This tonal gradient generates a field that simultaneously expands and contracts, suggesting a vortex or an astral body. Swirling with blue and white mineral glazes, the title of the work White Phosphorus/Cobalt evokes a range of paradoxical references, from chemical reactions and mining to natural phenomena and the cosmos. These micro-forms repeat and resemble fractals, echoing geological strata, meteorological patterns, or cosmic fields. Through this intimate–infinite dynamic, the work becomes a site of alchemical, political, and environmental significance, implicating the contentious associations with both white phosphorus and cobalt in relation to extraction and destruction.
The exhibition also features nine solid graphite relief panels titled Nocturnal(Milk Sky). Rendered in soft blue tones, these works depict the rhythmic rise and fall of the tide. Polished graphite elements are juxtaposed with ethereal blue and white skies, creating a visual interplay between reflection and atmosphere. Situated in the liminal space between land and sea, the real and the imagined, these panels highlight Fernández’s continued engagement with materials sourced directly from the earth. Graphite, a recurring element in her practice, underscores her conceptual focus on materiality and place. The parenthetical in the title—Milk Sky—evokes both the celestial expanse of the Milky Way and a maternal link between women and the cosmos.
Liquid Horizon offers a resonant meditation on land and water. Through material intricacy and conceptual depth, Teresita Fernández invites viewers into layered environments where boundaries between past and present, self and world, and memory and perception dissolve.
LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL
213, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04349
