'Materials Lab' Fernanda Fragateiro - Online Book Exhibition
Artist Fernanda Fragateiro’s new book Materials Lab presents us with new tools for navigating art, history and modernism.
Published by Beam Editions.
In 2015 artist Fernanda Fragateiro presented a series of plywood boxes containing research materials to students of Anthropology at Harvard Art Museums. The materials offered the audience an opportunity to explore the artist’s practice through research as an alternative to presenting documentary photographs of finished works. Silk threads, books, book segments, exhibition catalogues, models, notes, drawings, dust and fragments from projects past and yet to be realised came together in a ‘landscape’ of materials.
Materials Lab was later developed into an installation where 38 plywood boxes containing the materials are arranged as a series of layered connecting boxes that span the gallery space.
Each box reveals glimpses of Fragateiro’s research that bring together alternative histories that acts as a counter to the modernist patriarchal canon. Materials on artists, designers and architects like Eileen Grey, Alison and Peter Smithson and Donald Judd, Linda Bo Bardi, Lilly Reich stand alongside classic editions of Domus, CasaBella and Life Magazine featuring a young Angela Davies and influential texts like ‘Architecture without Architects’ by Bernard Rudofsky.
While the installation and book could easily be perceived as simply a collection of loosely related materials, the sum of the parts come together to make something far more interesting. Materials Lab is simultaneously installation, archive and now a book.
The project challenges conventional ideas of what any of these artistic forms which results in an open ended and ‘poetic landscape of knowledge’
History is not a single line and should not be defined by hierarchies and patriarchies. Materials Lab demonstrates the complexity of history and makes us consider how it’s essential to explore knowledge in all directions.
Materials Lab is perhaps also a new form of artwork, where the links between research, personal archive materials artwork and books become ever closer. It is this blurring of boundaries that highlights the need to transcend conical modernism and the use of artwork as a symbol of political and social power. Materials Lab is a new way of reading art and navigating history.
About Fernanda Fragateiro
Fernanda Fragateiro (Montijo, 1962) lives and works in Lisbon.
Fragateiro's projects are characterized by a strong interest in rethinking and probing modernist practices. Her practice involves an archaeological approach to the social, political and aesthetic history of modernism through continuous research with material from archives, documents and objects.
Acting in the field of three-dimensionality, challenging the tension between architecture and sculpture, Fernanda Fragateiro's work enhances the relationship with each place, calling the spectator to a performative position.
Her minimal sculptural and architectural interventions and installations in unexpected spaces (a monastery, an orphanage, or dilapidated houses) and her subtle changes to existing landscapes reveal buried stories of construction and transformation.
Some of her projects are the result of collaborations with architects, landscape architects, artists and performers.
Her work has been exhibited in different museums and national and international institutions such as the Bomba Gens Center d'Art (Valencia), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna Contemporanea (Roma), International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Museu de Miguel Art Urrutia (Bogotá), Museum of Architecture, Art and Technology (Lisbon), CaixaForum (Barcelona), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paris), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (Cambridge), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), the Centro Cultural de Belém, the Serralves Foundation (Porto), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré (Tours), among others.
Her work is represented in several collections, among which: Collection of Contemporary Art of the State, Portugal; Fundació Per Amor a l'Art, Valencia; Per The Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, Miami; Fundación Neme, Bogotá; Serralves Foundation, Porto; Fundação EDP, Lisbon; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; António Cachola Collection, Elvas; Berardo Museum Collection, Lisbon; Caixa Geral de Depósitos Contemporary Art Collection, Lisbon; Galician Center for Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander; La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona; Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres.
Fernanda Fragateiro is represented by Galeria Elba Benítez (Madrid), Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner Gallery (New York), Galeria Filomena Soares (Lisbon) and Irène Laub Gallery (Brussels).