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Agustin Fernandez (16 April 1928 Havana  - 2 June 2006 New York City) was a Cuban artist. Although his career begins in his homeland of Cuba, most of his work is produced in exile. During his life, which is marked by several major relocations, he produces paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculpture as well as artist’s books. Fernandez is amongst the most iconic Cuban painters of his generation.

Contents

 * 1Biography
 * 1.1Cuba
 * 1.2Paris
 * 1.3Leaving for America
 * 2Work
 * 3The Agustin Fernandez Foundation
 * 4Public Collections

Cuba[edit]
Agustin Rafael Octavio Eugenio Fernandez y Fernandez was born into a comfortable family who lived in the residential neighborhood of Marianao, Havana. They also owned a large tobacco plantation. The painter’s parents separate when he is only two years old. As a consequence in his early years he spends many afternoons with his maternal grandmother, Rafaela Mederos. This intellectual is fond of painting and literature; she does not hesitate to share her passions with Agustin. He paints his first painting her garden.

At the age of 11 Agustin starts taking painting lessons with one of his mother’s friends, Justica de Leon. But it is only in 1941 when he travels to New York with his aunt America, and sees the paintings hanging on the walls of the MoMA, that a real desire to study the arts emerges. He enters La Escuela Elemental de Artes Aplicadas Anexa when he is only 16. This school is also affiliated to the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, San Alejandro, where Fernandez later becomes a student in 1948-9.

Fernandez also studies Philosophy and Literature at the University of Havana until 1951. He spends two consecutive summers in New York at the Arts Students League and works alongside George Grosz and Yasuo Kuniyosh. Later, in 1953, accompanied by his first wife Maria Elena Molinet, he travels to France and Spain. In Madrid he takes classes at the Academia San Fernando and has his first solo show at the Buchholz Gallery.

Fernandez was successful early on in his career: he participates in numerous exhibits – both solo and group shows- including one at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington (1955) as well as another at the Museum of Fine Arts of Caracas (1959). At the Sao Paulo Biennale of 1957 he encounters Alfred Barr who, very interested in the artist’s work, purchases a first painting for the MoMA. Fernandez has a show at the MoMa a few years later, in 1958. That same year at the opening of his show at the Condon Riley Gallery in New York he meets Lia Epelboim, soon to become his second wife.

Paris
Agustin Fernandez supports the Cuban uprising against dictator Fulgencio Batista. He is also quite active in the people’s resistance movement. In 1959 after receiving, on behalf of the Castro government, a scholarship enabling him to study in France, he leaves his country as well as his first wife Maria Elena. He first joins Lia in New York and they travel together to Paris, where they settle in 1960. In 1961, Agustin and Lia exchange vows. That same year his scholarship comes to an end and thus he is called to return to the island. Nonetheless, because of Castro’s communist reforms Fernandez decides to stay in France. From then on he lives in exile: he will never return to his home country. With respect to exile Agustin said: “ I don’t know if exile influenced my work, but it has influenced me. It is not that I left Cuba, it’s not being able to return.”

In Paris Fernandez becomes friends with Simone Collinet, Andre Breton’s first wife and owner of the Galerie Fürstenberg. In the fall of 1960 he will have several solo and group exhibits there. Through Collinet he meets members of the parisian artistic elite such as Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Victor Brauner, Roberto Matta, Françoise Gillot, Raymond Queneau and Richard Wright. He shows with Francis Picabia at Galerie Fürstenberg (1965) and with Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, and Pierre Roy at Galerie André François Petit (1966). As of 1960 he participates, several times, in the Salon de Mai at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.

During his Paris years he paints Développement d’un délire (1961), which later will  appears in the Brian de Palma movie, Dressed to Kill (1980).

Leaving for America
After the events of May 1968, Agustin, Lia and their two children leave France. They move to San Juan, Puerto Rico where they live until 1972 when they move to New York City where the painter will live until his death. Fernandez speaks of the city in these terms: « In NY I found again the vitality of art  ». In 1979 he meets Robert Mapplethorpe. Lia and Agustin will share an intimate friendship with the American photographer until his death.

In the USA Fernandez continues to show in many galleries, such as Anita Shapolsky, 123 Watts and later at Mitchell Algus. But he also maintains an international presence. Agustin stays in contact with Galerie Fürstenberg in Paris where he has a solo exhibit in 1989. In Mexico he starts working with Galería Nina Menocal. Because of his Cuban origins he has an important following in Miami, thus in 1992 the International University of Florida dedicates a retrospective to his work. Later in 1999, he makes an 8 feet bronze statue, entitled La Vénus de Roaix. It is the only bronze of his career.

He dies only a few weeks after Lia’s passing.

Fernandez was the recipient of numerous honors. He was awarded a Cintas Foundation Fellowship in 1978. The artist was selected to create a permanent public ceramic mural at the Colegio de Arquitectos in Havana (1957). He was selected to participate in the VIII Salón Nacional de Pintura y Escultura, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (1956); the Bienal do Museum de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, (1957-Honorable Mention, 1959); Salon Comparaison, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (1961, 1964, 1965), and the Salon de Mai, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris and Tokyo (12 times between 1960 and 1993) and the Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano, El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan, Puerto Rico (First, 1970; Third, 1974-Honorable Mention).

Work
Agustin Fernandez’s work is in over two dozen public collections that include the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Círculo de Bellas Artes, Maracaibo, Venezuela; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba.

His work is most recognizable for its ambiguous and precariously balanced forms, erotic overtones, surreal juxtapositions, and metallic palette. Inspired by the demands of survival in an urban environment and the mundane objects that clutter its alleys and streets, Fernandez is a collector on a quest for the substance of creativity, complete with the armor of protection necessary to maneuver through time and place that becomes such an important source of his imagery. Paintings and objects are related and complementary and further complicate the identification of organic versus inorganic forms; human and machine; real and imagined; obsessive and cerebral. Nonetheless his work seems to defy labels.

Agustin never claimed his belonging to surrealism. In fact, he denied it on multiple occasions. However, American art critique, Donald Kuspit qualified Agustin as “the ultimate surrealist”. In the catalogue for a Fernandez exhibit at the American University Museum Katzen Center in Washington, which he curated in 2014, he argued his position: “by reason of his climactically bizarre treatment of the female body, the obsessive theme of a great many surrealist works, and because, to use André Breton’s words, his works have a more “immediate sense of absurdity” than other surrealistic works, particularly if absurdity is understood to signal unresolved conflict between conscious perception and unconscious fantasy. More broadly, historians regard Fernandez as the most internationally important Cuban artist to emerge in the postwar period.”

Fernandez is also often considered as an erotic painter. According to Jeanette Zwingenberger: “ His highly sculptural paintings invoke relief and invite touch, like the caress of a body unfolding onto a screen of inner projections. Fernandez tangibly depicts physical and psychological tensions, the coexistence of pleasure and pain, animality and cerebral constructs.’’ With regards to the erotic Fernandez, explains his work as follows: «  I am not exclusively an erotic painter. I tread that thin line between realism and abstract painting. My work has nothing to do with the pornographic even though it deals with the erotic. For me the erotic is not a fad, it has been with me since the sixties…Yes, in my work one finds sex and punishment, but I represent sex so that it is devoid of its physical or animal nature, so that it becomes its own essence. Caliban looking at himself in the mirror…Sexuality is just one of my themes. “

Many commentators have argued that Fernandez’s work must be analyzed within the context of New York City. Indeed, as Jeanette Zwingenberger posits: “In 1972, he settles in New York, fascinated by the energy of this machine-city’s skyscrapers. By contrast with the colourful hedonism of pop art and mass consumption, his palette turns black. His paintings now resemble shields of urban warriors reminiscent of Hans Ruedi Giger, who designed the science fiction monster in Alien. He was also influenced in his work by the punk atmosphere that he witnessed in his Manhattan neighborhood:. According to Rocio Alranda-Alvarado: “The contradictions represented by the public gestures of punk—torn clothing worn with thick boots and leather jackets, piercings in places never before considered, hair that defied gravity—are equally prevalent throughout the artist’s body of work.”.

Fernandez’s work also deals with the fusion of genders and the removal of the barriers that exist between male and female. This makes him an artist ahead of his time and his work revolutionary. Jonathan Katz, explains: “Fernandez’s refusal of a gendered binary is if anything more in evidence, for no longer are these combinations of differently gendered bodies, but rather one body of an utterly indecidable gender. Here’s another torso, rather more orthodox in the traditional sculptural sense of the torso as the upper quadrant of the body, sans head and arms. But what gender is this torso?”

The Agustin Fernandez Foundation
The Agustin Fernandez Foundation was established by the artist’s children after his passing in order to encourage an understanding and appreciation of Fernández’s artwork. The Foundation promotes exhibitions and scholarships about the artist and seeks to place his pieces in important museums and collections around the world for all to enjoy. It also maintains a database that catalogues all work produced by Fernandez and an archive about the artist and his work.

The Foundation reviews requests for copyrights and also gives advice on the history, authenticity, preservation and restoration of works by Fernandez.

It is linked to a French organization based in Paris: Les Amis d’Agustin Fernandez.

The foundation published a major monograph in 2012, entitled The Metamorphosis of Experience.

Public Collections
Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, D.C.

Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York

Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France

Cintas Foundation, Miami, Florida

Círculo de Bellas Artes, Maracaibo, Venezuela

El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York

Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York

[[Blanton Museum of Art|Jack S. Blanton Museum  of Art]], University of Texas, Austin, Texas

JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York, New York

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

Miami-Dade Public Library, Miami, Florida

Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia

Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba

Museum of Art,  Nova Southern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California

Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico

New York Public Library, New York, New York

Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Saint Thomas University Library, Houston, Texas

The Frost Art Museum, [[Florida  International University]], Miami, Florida

The Patrick Lannan Foundation,  Palm Beach, Florida

University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah,  Salt Lake City, Utah

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

[[Yale University  Art Gallery]], New Haven, Connecticut