TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ: SOIL HORIZON
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announces Soil Horizon, an exhibition by New York based artist Teresita Fernández. In Soil Horizon, the artist turns inward, to the elusive and numinous landscapes we carry within.
April 25 - June 1, 2024
Returning repeatedly to the question “Where am I?” as an emotive and conceptual point of origin, Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and places. The artist’s subtle conceptual practice and material processes have positioned her at the forefront of contemporary art, cementing her place in the canon and contextualizing her work within art historical discourse on art and land.
In Soil Horizon Fernández debuts several bodies of work, including two large-scale sculptural pieces, a series of copper relief panels, and notably, her first film. Where previous exhibitions have focused more explicitly on the historical, socio-political, or elemental aspects of place, in Soil Horizon Fernández turns her attention to the inner realm, contemplating her coordinates through geological, cosmological, and existential lenses.
The exhibition takes its title from a geology term used to describe the horizontal layers that make up what we consider earth, from the matrix of bedrock to the topmost layer of fertile soil. Each layer, or “horizon,” has its own unique material characteristics, and, like a portrait of a place, each demarcates the chronology, or life, of the land whose soil profile it constitutes.
Spanning the full length of the gallery’s longest wall is the show’s central installation, Sky(Burial). The work is comprised of over 7,500 ceramic cubes, each uniquely glazed to create a saturated, vibrating array of earthen textures formed by the chemical reactions that occur during kiln-firing. The process mirrors, on an intimate scale, the epic geological processes of the earth’s formation.
Ordered in wide bands of earthy, colored strata, Sky(Burial) is bisected horizontally by a narrow gap of empty space. Despite its rich materiality, in this work Fernández draws the viewer’s eye precisely to where no material is present—the threshold dividing the upper and lower realms, separating above and below. This space can be understood as a bardo, a liminal gap between two states of existence associated in Buddhism with the transition between life and death, death and rebirth.
In Soil Horizon, Fernández asserts that there are no true boundaries between ourselves and the expansive landscapes that surround us. Instead, we are intrinsically enmeshed in both the physical and the temporal world—standing always at the continuous intersection between the past and future, situated precisely at the evocative threshold where the heavens meet the earth.