Agustín Fernández

Agustín Fernández became one of the most singular figures in postwar Latin American modernism. He received classical training at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (1946–1950), where drawing from life formed the foundation of his practice. Summer studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1948 and 1949 with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and George Grosz proved pivotal; Kuniyoshi’s rejection of strict academic naturalism and emphasis on modeling from light to dark deeply influenced Fernández’s evolving approach. He also studied philosophy and languages at the Universidad de La Habana and later audited courses at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid (1953).

 

By the mid-1950s, Fernández was exhibiting internationally, with solo exhibitions in Washington, D.C., New York, and Caracas, and participation in the IV and V São Paulo Biennials. In 1958, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired his painting Still Life and Landscape (1956), marking an early institutional milestone.

 

In 1959, he relocated to Paris on a scholarship from the Cuban government. Following the Cuban Revolution, he remained abroad in self-imposed exile, living in Paris (1959–1968), San Juan (1968–1972), and New York (1972–2006). In Paris, he encountered Surrealist figures such as Max Ernst and Roberto Matta, yet maintained an independent position. While his biomorphic abstractions and psychologically charged imagery bear affinities to Surrealism, Fernández redeployed its language to explore existential tension, eroticism, and the psychic condition of exile.

 

Across the 1960s and 1970s, he developed his signature sculptural compositions: meticulously rendered forms pressed into shallow, ambiguous space. Razor blades, cherries, pins, and later the so-called “Armor” paintings introduced imagery at once sensual and confrontational. In the 1980s and early 1990s, recurring motifs such as serpents, butterflies, and the hybrid femme-oiseau expanded his symbolic vocabulary.

 

Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, assemblage, and artist’s books, Fernández treated each medium as a parallel investigation into illusion and volume. His works transform objects into charged, ambiguous forms—at once corporeal and abstract—resisting fixed interpretation.

 

Over the course of his career, Fernández held more than thirty solo exhibitions and participated in over one hundred group exhibitions across Europe, the United States, and Latin America. His work is included in major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; El Museo del Barrio; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Yale University Art Gallery; and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

 

Marked by technical rigor and psychological intensity, Fernández’s work remains a powerful meditation on displacement, embodiment, and the unstable boundary between beauty and menace.