Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Soil Horizon, an exhibition of new work by New York based artist Teresita Fernández. Over the course of her decades-long career, Fernández’s practice has been characterized by an expansive reimagining of what constitutes a landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, to contentious borderlines and borderlands. In Soil Horizon, the artist turns inward, to the elusive and numinous landscapes we carry within. 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.
Following Soil Horizon at Lehmann Maupin, SITE Santa Fe will present Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Opening in July 2024, this two-artist exhibition will feature over 30 works by Fernández and mark the first time Robert Smithson’s oeuvre has been placed in conversation with an artist working today. Other forthcoming projects include a monumental site-specific installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts to be unveiled in 2025. Fernández’s ambitious project will mark the museum’s first major installation in the Josephine F. & Walter B. Ford Great Hall, inaugurating a series of dynamic contemporary art activations.
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. Here, the term “soil horizon” is used metaphorically to imagine what is buried, in transition, or yet to emerge. In this exhibition Fernández contemplates the ground, asserting that living landscapes are conceptually “stacked” —embodying not only what we see around us, but also the many subtle and accumulated layers of time, events, and matter that are always above and below, obscured beyond the limits of our immediate primary perception.
Featured prominently in the exhibition is the titular body of work—a series of copper panels with a luminous, immersive horizon as their throughline. The bottom of each Soil Horizon panel is sculpted from dimensional charcoal fragments, densely packed to create a solid ground. Crystalline layers of black volcanic sand and red iron-rich sand, sourced from two separate continents, merge in each composition, their interspersed, horizontal striations slowly dissolving into ascending color shifts. Above, Fernández creates an intricate stippled effect that alternately obscures and reveals the warm glow of the copper beneath, creating atmospheric skyscapes in which viewers catch glimpses of their blurred reflections. In these works, the artist envisions numinous landscapes that propose a more expansive idea of place—from the ancient, historical, and subterranean, to the futuristic and celestial.
Rising from the gallery floor is Sunrise(Sunset) a monumental sculpture made of cast concrete that extends 24 feet in length. The title refers to the commonly used epitaph that compares the revolution of a person’s life and death cycle with that of the sun’s 24-hour passage. Low to the ground plane, Sunrise(Sunset) gently arches to suggest the eclipsed shape of an invisible circle, or planetary body, interred in or rising up from the floor. The top of the sculpture features exposed aggregate made of multicolored rocks and minerals, while the polished sides of the work reveal the multiple, fluid strata of poured concrete, recalling the horizons of a soil profile. The sculpture’s heavy, minimal presence exudes a somber gravitas that references a tumulus, or mound—a universal form used to mark a sacred place of burial.
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. The title Sky(Burial) refers to the Tibetan tradition of compassionately placing the deceased’s body on a mountaintop to be consumed by birds and dispersed into the world in small fragments. Here, Fernández prompts viewers to recognize human beings as kindred matter and extension of land, drawing attention to the landscape of our own bodies and our eternal intertwining with the cycles of the natural world.
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. The concept is echoed in a series of delicate, intimately-scaled sculptures, also titled Bardo which consist of a miniature cross-section slab of polished jasper stone. In these works, Fernández imagines the absent matter above and below the natural stone material by casting the missing areas in plaster and rendering its subterranean characteristics with applications of banded, earth-toned colors.
Soil Horizon also features Caribbean Cosmos(Earth), the newest work in Fernández’s Caribbean Cosmos series. Composed of thousands of tiny ceramic tesserae, Caribbean Cosmos(Earth) is legible on both a micro and macro level, shifting between the exquisite details of each lush tile and the immense cosmic field that can be read as vast planetary reference points. In Caribbean Cosmos(Earth) and across each work in the exhibition, Fernández’s intuitive understanding of scale, and how its manipulation can function to create a sense of intimacy, is evident.
The exhibition ends with Cuajaní, Fernández’s first foray into film. Co-directed as a collaborative project with artist Juan Carlos Alom, Cuajaní is a 16mm black and white film that presents a poetic portrait of a timeless landscape. Shot intermittently over six years in the Viñales Valley, an iconic rural area in western Cuba, the work is characterized by the immersive sounds and images that portray the landscape as protagonist. Inverting the convention of a figure in a landscape, here the landscape is the central character itself, watching the family that lives on and moves through its distinct physical elements, including its primeval karst formations, dark caves, and ephemeral mist. The film imagines the living, breathing landscape perceiving itself and its inhabitants, with humans, flora, and fauna in meditative communion with one another and a shared consciousness with the land, as its diurnal and nocturnal turnings of everyday life unfold.
Cuajaní presents landscape as a discrete living body, one whose edges extend deep below the surface of the earth as well as high above it. This holistic and multidimensional understanding of place is reflected across all of the work in the exhibition, from the sedimentary layers of Sunrise(Sunset) to the atmospheric dispersion of organic matter in Sky(Burial). 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.