Magdalena Fernández
Museo Amparo, 2020A visit to Magdalena Fernández’s retrospective feels like taking a quiz on modernist abstract art—her works echo that era’s compositions and motifs, summoning such icons as Malevich, Mondrian, Lygia Clark, and Gego. The pieces on display, however, which span the eleven most recent years of Fernández’s career, elude our expectations for appropriation art. Take 1iHO008. Homenaje a Hélio Oiticica (1iHO008. Homage to Hélio Oiticica), 2008, an immersive video installation in which the blue squares and rectangles from said work, projected onto all four of the gallery’s walls, slowly pace around the room’s perimeter, their intense blue hue reflecting on the spectators’ bodies. Oiticica engaged in new genres to blur the boundaries between art and its beholder; Fernández continues his quest by employing technology to fuse art and its observers into one.