Agustín Fernández

Cuban painter. He studied at the Academia de S Alejandro in Havana from 1946 to 1950 and the Art Students League, New York, in 1949. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Lyceum in Havana in 1951. In 1959 he left Cuba for Paris, from where he moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968 before settling in New York in 1972 as a political exile.During the 1950s Fernández painted luminous pictures that combine still-life elements with landscapes, as in Landscape and Still-life (1956; New York, MOMA). In such works he made elements of the still-life dissolve into the distant landscape forms in order to coalesce the expansiveness of landscape with the still-life interplay of form and light. In the 1960s he developed his mature style, characterized by images of body parts and armour on large canvases painted in earth tones, greys, and black and white. Like his Brazilian contemporary Antonio Henrique Amaral, he explored unflinchingly the interrelationship of sexuality and aggression without sensationalism or vulgarity, as in The Large Skin (1964; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.), in which the multiplication of breasts and blades is used to explore how violence and eroticism parallel each other in affirming and subverting the integrity of the self. Fernández’s work is formal and lyrical, almost metaphysical, rather than cathartically expressionist.Source: http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T027938?q=agustin+fernandez&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit