Agustín Fernández
The Alluring Power of Ambiguity
Cuban-born Agustín Fernández (1928–2006) was a modern master, incorporating a non-dualistic visual language of figuration and abstraction. Juxtaposing anatomical images with subdued coloration, Fernández is an artist difficult to position within the color-saturated Cuban canon. His ambiguous forms are evocative of flesh and eros, represented through a monochromatic palette. Resonating with the broader modernist movement, Fernández’s work explores themes of exile, separation, and abandonment.
Self-identifying as a “painter of the brush,” Fernández was also an undisputed master of drawing. A first-rate draftsman, his works include depictions of ripped and folded paper, pins, hooks, belts, lines, and spikes. His aesthetic in both painting and drawing revolves around these iconographic elements, reflecting a world of aggression and conflict, physical pain, and metaphysical contemplation. Fernández examines these themes through a psychological lens.
Fernández’s work reflects a wide range of influences, from surrealism to post-Minimalism to New York City’s punk culture. Trained at Havana’s preeminent art academy, San Alejandro, Fernández left the Cuban capital for Paris in 1959, where he absorbed the tenets of surrealism. His subsequent moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and New York City reveal how these places informed his aesthetic and metaphysical explorations.
The retrospective exhibition Agustín Fernández: The Alluring Power of Ambiguity traces Fernández’s trajectory from Cuba to New York City and includes over 65 works of art, including large-scale paintings, drawings, collages, and portfolios, along with an unpublished personal memoir. Curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta with the assistance of Gabriela Goizueta, the exhibition builds on the Frost Art Museum’s 1992 exhibition, Agustín Fernández: A Retrospective, and draws on the Frost’s extensive holdings of Fernández’s work. Works from the Agustín Fernández estate, private collectors, and the Frost—many of which have never been exhibited—form the basis of this in-depth examination.
Fernández studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, Havana (1944–46), venturing abroad for courses at the Art Students League of New York and Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He left Cuba permanently in 1959 and lived in Paris (1959–68); San Juan (1968–72); and New York (1972–2006). During his lifetime Fernández held more than thirty solo exhibitions and participated in over one hundred group shows at major galleries and museums internationally. In 1992 the Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami (now the Frost Art Museum), organized a major retrospective of his work. In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami organized Armaduras. Fernández is represented in multiple museum collections around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; and the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, among others.
Agustín Fernández, Le Fleur Bleue, 1959, Oil on linen, 40 x 35 inches, Gift of Joe Novak, FIU 2005.008
