The Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to announce that the upcoming season will open with an exhibition of new work by Fernanda Fragateiro, opening September 14th.
Titled Escola Clandestina (Clandestine School), the exhibition will consist of a series of abstract sculptures assembled from architectural fragments collected by Fragateiro from recently demolished buildings in Lisbon. For Fragateiro, these modern “ruins” and the traces of historical memory they contain highlight the rupture, often violent, between past ideologies and present realities. Recovered and repurposed as art, they thus encapsulate a range of social, political and economic themes within autonomous and aesthetically powerful works of contemporary sculpture.
The work of Fernanda Fragateiro (Montijo, 1962; lives and works in Lisbon) maintains a strong signature style born of an economy of means and a meticulous minimalist aesthetic of form, color and surface texture. Fragateiro’s primary media are sculpture and installation, although she also creates interventions into public space in the form of gardens, outdoor sculptures and collaborations in architectural projects. Drawing thematically on 20th-century modernist art and architecture, Fragateiro frequently repurposes already-existing and culturally-layered material — such as silk threads found in a ruined German textile factory, second-hand art books and magazines, discarded architectural maquettes, or rubble produced during Portugal’s construction boom — in order to fashion new works that are criss-crossed by an intricate web of inner references to art theory, architectural history, feminist discourse and political revisionism.
Escola Clandestina is Fragateiro’s sixth solo exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez and forms part of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend.
