Montijo, Portugal, 1962
Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal
Fernanda Fragateiro frames her practice as a wide-ranging and expanded exploration of space in its multiple manifestations — private, public, temporal, socially determined, gender-defined – via works of sculpture, installation and outdoor interventions.
While varying in scale and drawing on a wide range of reference material, Fragateiro’s work maintains a strong signature style, born of a meticulous minimalist aesthetic of form, color and surface texture. But while this precise formalist quality is often hard-edged, the work itself in its final form is not programatic or dogmatic — to the contrary, Fragateiro’s interventions extend beyond the limits of the object and embrace the phenomenological fullness of the space and perceptual experience in which the both the object and that object’s viewer exist.
Fragateiro frequently employs the method of repurposing already-existing and culturally-layered material — such as silk threads found in a German factory, second-hand books and magazines, discarded architectural maquettes, or rubble produced during Portugal’s construction boom — in order to fashion complex yet delicate works of her own that criss-crossed by an intricate web of inner references to art theory, architectural history, feminist discourse and political revisionism.
