Teresita Fernández Maps the Infinite in ‘Liquid Horizon’ at Lehmann Maupin

Cuban-American artist Teresita Fernández has made her name with large-scale, site-specific installations and sculptures that examine perception, landscape and the psychological dimensions of space. At the center of her practice is an aesthetic, philosophical and energetic investigation of materials, exploring connections between geology and cosmology, the micro- and macrocosmos, to better understand the implications of human experience within an expanded space that often exceeds physical and intellectual reach.

Through a poetic and incisive inquiry into the tension between universal forces and human capacity, Fernández’s evocative works confront the power and colonial exploitation embedded in landscapes and in materials themselves. Her art reveals the complexities and contradictions of natural environments, presenting them not merely as physical terrain but as charged spaces of psychological, political and cultural resonance.

For her latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul, Fernández turns to the notion of the horizon—that threshold between earthly and celestial realms, between elements, between sensorial and spiritual dimensions. Titled “Liquid Horizon,” the show features luminous sculptural panels marked by horizontal compositions that resemble maritime landscapes, with the sea’s abysses set against the profound darkness of an oceanic night. “We’ve been conditioned to think of the term horizon as one singular threshold between what’s above and what’s below,” Fernández tells Observer.

Her previous body of work, Soil Horizon, drew on the geological term describing the horizontal layers of rock and minerals that mark the earth’s formation. As she notes, the series reflected how the “horizon” is not one line but strata that hold past, present and future. “Liquid Horizon” expands this conceptual framework from soil to ocean, engaging the fluid bodies of water that surround us. “Like the land, the oceans are divided into vertical realms of depth and darkness, for the most part unknown to humans.” It is no coincidence that the ocean’s depths are also culturally and metaphorically invoked to describe psychological and spiritual realms—those psychic landscapes that live within us.

There is something deeply primordial about the images these works conjure, evoking the universe in its earliest genesis or streams of particles and molecules in continuous transmutation across physical states. Here, the waterline becomes both threshold and abyss, holding the vastness above and below its liminal edge. Extending Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency as metaphors and manifestations of our subconscious—primordial connections to broader natural phenomena.

A core element of Fernández’s practice is what she calls “the intelligence of materials”—the belief that matter carries political, philosophical and cultural meaning as part of its own journey of formation and transformation. “While some of these works, especially the panels, touch upon notions of painting, I thoroughly think of them as sculptures, given that the images are emerging by a very tactile layering of charcoal, graphite, sand, ceramics and pigment that is both dimensional and vibrating,” Fernández explains. “In this sense, materials are already loaded with an intelligence that connects them to their sources and origins.”

For her, these works remain, in essence, fragments of the landscapes from which they come. The material choices carry symbolic and conceptual weight, imbued with their own histories. “I think of it as making a landscape with a landscape, so that it’s never a symbol of a landscape, but actually a material fact,” she adds, noting how in some works, she deliberately invokes the violent and extractive histories of those two substances.

At the same time, the works explore the interplay between geology and waterways, staging tensions between micro and macro to provoke reflection on human impact and the limits of perception. “I’m always interested in these correlations between what is immense and what is intimate. The works function on many scales simultaneously that shift experientially as viewers move closer to their surfaces,” Fernández confirms. “Most importantly, these states are vibrating, not fixed—but mutable, behaving like water itself. The act of looking and thinking is by nature thoroughly fluid and dynamic.”

In this context, scale also becomes critical. While Fernández often creates monumental environmental interventions—most recently her site-specific installation at the Menil Collection—here the works feel more contained and intimate. Yet they retain the site-specific quality central to her approach, continually negotiating the relationship between materials, space and viewer. “In many ways, I’m engaging viewers materially, almost so that one becomes the size of the thing one is looking at,” she explains.

This is especially true of White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025), a glazed ceramic installation in which a dispersed mosaic constellation materializes the idea that the macro contains the infinity of the micro. In the continuous flow of particles, the work embodies the cycles of birth, transformation and destruction that entropy drives. “The arrangement of thousands of ceramic cubes seen from a distance functions like a vibrating field of color,” Fernández explains. “Yet, upon close inspection, each individual glazed ceramic cube seen up close dissolves into an immense cosmic image that suggests galaxies—the vast nesting inside the tiny.”

Fernández’s intention is for these works to remain materially dynamic, constantly unfolding and collapsing into themselves, embodying the entropic structure of the cosmos. The exhibition features nine solid graphite relief panels titled Nocturnal (Milk Sky), evoking the rhythmic rise and fall of tides through layers of deep blue tones. Polished graphite elements play against ethereal blue and white skies, creating a dialogue of reflection and atmosphere. Here, as elsewhere in the show, the use of deep blue heightens the sense of vast, unreachable dimensions—phenomena only partially graspable when set against their broader cosmic scale. Ultimately, Fernández’s latest body of sculptural fields serves as a meditation on humanity’s fragile position within the universe, suspended among terrestrial, aquatic and celestial horizons on which we depend and with which we evolve in endless reciprocity as part of the planet’s matter.

Teresita Fernández’s “Liquid Horizon” is on view at Lehmann Maupin Seoul through October 25, 2025.