Agustín Fernández

Among the most cosmopolitan artists to emerge from Cuba’s final vanguardia generation, Agustín Fernández (1928-2006) ranks as one of Surrealism’s most discerning latter-day interpreters.

Fernández cultivated an idiosyncratic visual language distilled through the erotics of desire and vulnerability, provocatively ratcheted up through contact first with the post-war Surrealist circle in Paris and, starting in 1972, with the gritty counterculture of downtown New York. The trajectory of his career, from the lyrical exuberance of his early work in pre-Revolutionary Havana to the coolly sadistic armored plates of later years, suggests a rich assimilation of the artist’s Cuban inheritance and identity with the conceptual sophistication of the contemporary art world. Working betwixt and between more familiar currents of Latin American abstraction and nationalist paradigms, Fernández charted a sui generis course, and his oeuvre speaks subtly both to the condition of exile and to the canny perseverance of Surrealist tropes into the postmodern landscape. 

McEwen, Abigail. “Agustín Fernández, The Enigma of Desire.”, Art Nexus. Vol. 85, No.11, 2012 [illus.], pp. 60-65.

News

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Feb. 15, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026

We are pleased to announce the retrospective exhibition Agustín Fernández: The Alluring Power of Ambiguity, which traces Fernández’s trajectory from Cuba to New York City and presents over 65 works of art, including large-scale paintings, drawings, collages, and...

El Espacio Twenty Three

a A 1960's work by Agustin Fernandez is on view in Mirror of the Mind: Figuration in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, an exhibtion which explores the entangled, inseparable relationship between the physical and emotional aspects of the body. Untitled,...

The Menil Collection, September 20- January 26, 2024

We are pleased to announce that two Fernandez drawings from The Menil Collection, Houston have been chosen as part of the current show: Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms

The Agustín Fernández Foundation was established in 2005 to preserve, promote and honour the work of Cuban artist Agustin Fernández (1928-2005). The foundation is a 501(c) (3) organization that relies on the generous support of donors to foster scholarship, exhibition, publication and archival projects on the life and work of Fernández.

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