Bienvenu Steinberg & J is pleased to present On Love, Fernanda Fragateiro’s third exhibition with the gallery. Characterized by her interest in rethinking and probing modernist practices, Fragateiro's work involves an archaeological approach to the social, political, and aesthetic history of modernism. Through continuous research with material from archives, documents, and objects, she establishes a nuanced political feminist position by uncovering the architectural gestures of mostly absent female subjects. In the annals of history, dormant things lie—unsaid, unfinished, discarded. Fragateiro reexamines and renders them into three-dimensional form. On Love is a constellation of conversations with women artists, architects, and designers—from Elaine Lustig Cohen and Otti Berger, to Lina Bo Bardi and Alison Smithson who, by becoming the caretakers for history, have been oftentimes occluded from it.
When Gloria Bush, an Italian-American art dealer living in Lisbon, passed away, no one came forward to claim her belongings. Among the objects, many of them art books, was On Love by Ortega y Gasset, with a cover designed by Elaine Lustig Cohen. First married to modernist graphic designer Alvin Lustig, she joined his studio, performing administrative labor, and eventually, when her husband became blind, executed his designs following his instructions. It was only after his death that Cohen would begin her own practice. At the time she was one of the few women to run their own graphic design studio in the mid-twentieth century. In E.L.C (Same Difference) 1 and 2, Fragateiro uses shapes and colors reminiscent of Cohen’s designs and extends them outwards, beckoning their lines into three-dimensionality.
In the exhibition, Fragateiro mobilizes books as intertextual and sculptural forms that actively reshape discourses. Within the space of Demolition (Bauhaus), the artist repurposes the book—titled Bauhaus—transforming it into a pliable substance. Here, she hand-paints the overlooked and marginalized names of women artists, architects, and designers directly over the original covers, enacting a form of restorative justice.
With L.B. Forest School 1, 2, and 3, a new series made of lacquered metal and raffia, a supple fiber coming from palm leaves, Fragateiro pays homage to the recently celebrated legendary Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi and her interest in vernacular design and materials. In her projects, Bo Bardi facilitated a coalescence of seemingly dissonant materials, the paradoxes and potentials that this work represents in its link with a “primitivism” of a modernist face. Here, geometric metal shapes emerge in Modernist order from the raffia’s body-like presence.
With A.S. (A message of hope from another planet) Fragateiro references British architect Alison Smithson and her design of the Pogo Chair. The sculpture sits upright in the same manner of the anthropomorphic shape and further showcases the line as the point of departure, bringing the viewer into connection with Smithson’s thoughtful reinvention of form.
O.B. (Christmas and New Year’s card, after Otti Berger, 1937) and the Texts without Words series are five new textile works made of extremely fine raw silk sourced in a women's community from the North of Portugal (Museu da Seda e do Território de Freixo de Espada à Cinta) and woven by textile artist Ana Gonçalves. Interlaced into the sun-bleached color of the raw silk are dark gray lines, lines of text without words, truncated articulations. Within these delicate works, Fragateiro evokes the memory of Otti Berger, a visionary textile designer from the Bauhaus who was sent to her death in Auschwitz, in the process of waiting for a visa to the United States. O.B. (Christmas and New Year’s Card, after Otti Berger, 1937) is a facsimile of a greeting card woven by Otti Berger while exiled in London. The horizontal lines in Fragateiro’s silk pieces become visually entangled in the two orange and white wall hanging sculptures, rendered from metal sheets that overlap to create a lax grid line formation. Inspired by Agnes Martin’s drawing, “Aspiration”, Fragateiro’s sculptures parse the linearities out, expanding them both vertically and horizontally.
In On Love, Fragateiro navigates with the praxis of an archaeologist and maker, within a lineage of modernist seriality, she covertly embeds narratives that have lingered in the shadows. At its core, Fragateiro's practice is one of meticulous care, gathering the "other things" lying latent within history and continuing the thread.
Born in 1962 in Montijo, Portugal, Fernanda Fragateiro lives and works in Lisbon. She has been commissioned for many public art projects and exhibited extensively internationally including at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna Contemporanea (Rome), Museu de Miguel Art Urrutia (Bogota), Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (MAAT) (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), Centro Cultural de Belém, (Lisbon), Fundação Serralves (Porto), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré (Tours), among others.