Monotypes, drawings, paintings and a rod installation occupy the space of the Galería RGR, evoking a model of work production like the one the semiologist Umberto Eco conceived in the early 1960s: the “opera aperta.” While the work of art mirrors the variables and contingencies of its context, the history, language, gender, sexuality, ideology, and culture, for Eco only the material of art can offer the appropriate information to the form it adopts. In this sense, every work of art, both past and present, is open.
The artist Magdalena Fernández —trained between Caracas and Milan during the debates on postmodernism and post humanism— embraced the practice of abstraction against the current, and has since undertaken a tireless renovation of the historical materials of geometric abstraction and constructivism, through a slow, precise, and delicate work. To this end, Fernández has confronted the vicissitudes that come with undoing the bodies of sculpture, painting and moving images, with the intention of building real or virtual spaces. In her practice, science and art are often interchangeable terms. Her approach to three-dimensionality explores negative space and the vector and interstices that unfold and open the work of art to polysemic dimension. According to Norma Morales, engraving teacher at TAGA —graphic experimentation workshop where Fernández has developed several monotype series, — “the flash, reverb and cloudscape are present phenomena” in the artist’s research, who has translated them plastically into drawing.
The exhibition prepared by Fernández for RGR’s 2024 program closure includes a group of splendid works which, on the one hand, research the trajectory of moving bodies to the point of disintegration, and on the other, invite the public to create a poetic field in an open work were all meaning is possible.
Gabriela Rangel
Magdalena Fernández’s versatility as an artist is a reflection of her path through the fields of physics, mathematics, graphic design, visual, and sound arts. Since the 1990s, she began to experiment with participative works that echoed the profound modernist history of Venezuelan art, referring to interventions in public spaces and collective experiences, similar to those configured by artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto.
Fernández has kept in dialogue with different modernist tendencies, establishing formal links in more recent media, both analogue and digital, that materialize abstraction into a historical discourse subject to widening, modifications, and distinct recoveries. An important part of this process of grounding has been to return to abstraction its worldliness, its connection to the natural environment and all those landscapes and soundscapes the experience of which transcends representation or metaphor. For Fernández, the instability of the abstraction canon finds echoes in the instability of nature: change, movement, fragmentation and transformation. All these elements constitute the starting point to relate art, artist and spectator.
Through video, installations, sculpture, drawing and graphic works, the Fernández moves the body into structures that tend towards change, promoting the fluidity of something that in principle would appear entirely solid.
She currently lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela.
Magdalena Fernández
1i024, 2024
Silicone spheres, steel with electrostatic paint
Variable dimensions
Inquire
Magdalena Fernández
1ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
5ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
7ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
8ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
10ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
9pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 140 cm
55 x 55 in
Magdalena Fernández
3pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
65 x 65 cm
25 1/2 x 25 1/2 in
Magdalena Fernández
4pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
65 x 65 cm
25 1/2 x 25 1/2 in
Magdalena Fernández
8pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 140 cm
55 x 55 in
Magdalena Fernández
11pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 140 cm
55 x 55 in
Magdalena Fernández
12pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 140 cm
55 x 55 in
Magdalena Fernández
7pea024, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 140 cm
55 x 55 in
Inquire
Magdalena Fernández
11ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
12ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
13ea020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Monotype on Rives BFK printmaking paper
Unframed:
50 x 35 cm
19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in
Framed:
56 x 41 x 3 cm
22 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
10d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
11d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
12d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
9d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
3d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in
Magdalena Fernández
1d020, Series: Estructuras abiertas, 2020
Chinese ink on opaline paper
Unframed:
30 x 23 cm
11 3/4 x 9 in
Framed:
36 x 29 x 3 cm
14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in