A Conversation with Fernanda Fragateiro


  • Fernanda Fragateiro

  • (Not) Reading Rainbow Colors After Willy Fleckhaus, Suhrkamp Catalogue, 1963 - 2010

  • Corbusier Color Keyboards published by Salubra (1931 and 1959) 2011

  • Double-Sided Bookcase Floor 2010

  • Double Words, 2011

  • Modern Architecture Without Architects, 2011

  • MR10 Double Chair After Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, 2009


Talk

  1. Apr 14, 2015, 6 – 7:30 pm
Menschel Hall, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street

Fernanda Fragateiro’s sculptures 
and installations depart from existing or recognizable design, architecture, publications, and artifacts—such as iconic chairs by Mies van der Rohe, sumptuous textiles by Bauhaus designer Lilly Reich or colorful books by the famed German publisher Surkamp—to rethink prevalent narratives about modernism. Her rigorous practice involves an archaeology into modernism’s social, political and aesthetic history through ongoing research with archival matter, materials, and objects. In doing so, she uses our familiarity with the modernist aesthetic to undermine accepted knowledge of its key figures and historical moment through interventions that alter the appearance of things. Her richly complex works often stop and redirect our attention toward the broader cultural conditions responsible for the modernist ethos and the affect it continues to wage on our present moment. 

Fernanda Fragateiro will be in conversation with James Voorhies, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center, including a discussion about the role of research in her practice and her contributions to the recent CCVA exhibition The Way We Live Now, Modernist Ideologies at Work.

Fernanda Fragateiro

Fernanda Fragateiro's work has been exhibited at Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Paris (2015), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University – Cambridge (2015), Krannert Art Museum, Urbanana-Champaign, Illinois (2015), CIFO Art Space, Miami (2014), Bronx Museum, New York (2014), Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián (2014), MUAC, Mexico (2014), Centre Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris (2013), Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2012), at Dublin Contemporary (2011), at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2010) and in public institutions and museums such as the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander (2009); IVAM, Valencia (2008); Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2007); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela (2006); Serralves Foundation, Porto (2005); Fundación 'La Caixa', Caixa Forum, Barcelona (2004); Culturgest, Lisbon (2003); and Künstlerwerkstatt, Munich (1997).

A Conversation with Fernanda Fragateiro is organized by the Harvard Art Museums and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. It is part of the series What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century organized by the Harvard Art Museums to consider how artists today use a variety of research methodologies to reimagine the lasting and conflicted legacies of modernism in the contemporary moment.