Nüart Gallery presents, Rafa Fernández: The Time Traveler Series, a solo exhibition of recently released work by the late Costa Rican master, Rafa Fernández. The exhibition will run August 7th through August 23rd 2020, with a virtual artist talk on Friday, August 7th from 4:00 - 5:00 pm MDT with Fernández’s daughter. Please join us on Zoom to hear stories about this legendary painter.
Rafa Fernández is recognized as a major figure of Latin American magical realism. In a career that spanned over six decades, Fernández was known for his technical prowess, rich imagination, and dreamlike figurations. Gaining recognition in the international arena in the 1970s for an expressionistic style full of chimerical figures inhabiting esoteric atmospheres, Fernández found his voice in the magic realism that would come to define his career. In the 1980s and 90s, his palette became warmer and more vibrant, his figures primarily feminine, and a personal iconography that read as a set of ritual elements. The final two decades of Rafa Fernández’s career were perhaps his most prolific, even as his place as a master of Latin American painting was set.
Nüart Gallery is honored to present fifteen mixed-media works on paper from Rafa Fernández’s Time Traveler Series. The work was created late in Fernández’s career, at a time where the physical limitations that characterized his later years had unleashed a certain unbridled imaginative freedom in his painting. The Time Traveler paintings present a dreamlike expressionistic freedom full of energy and vibrancy with ultramarine seas, deep violet skies, crescent moons, mystical equestrians, and mysterious veiled women drifting through the compositions.
Throughout his 65-year career, Rafa Fernández exhibited internationally including in museums and galleries in Costa Rica, Spain, Colombia, the United States, France, and Italy. His work is in the permanent collections of museums including: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy; the Goya Museum in Zaragoza, Spain; the Museo de Arte Costarricense in San Jose, Costa Rica; the Museum José Luis Cuevas in México, The Museum Ralli of Contemporary Art in Punta del Este, Uruguay; The Capilla del Hombre in Quito, Ecuador. During his residence in Spain he was awarded the Santiago de Santiago and the Galerias Preciados. Three times he was awarded the Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría, Costa Rica’s national prize in painting. In 2002 he was awarded the Premio Magón, the highest civilian honor awarded by Costa Rica for his lifetime of achievement as an artist.