[open the box] Fernanda Fragateiro

Fernanda Fragateiro’s work occupies a somewhat unusual place in recent Portuguese art because it defines sculptural situations that simultaneously live off two different instances of the understanding of what sculpture might be. On the one hand they are three-dimensional works in space that deal with references from the History of the Art of the 20th century, from the Russian avant-garde, to the founding moments of the modern movement. On the other hand, they are devices that generate situations of effective use by the spectator, as if the reason for them to exist were always linked to the primacy of the exercising of a function, most often destined to be collectively used.

This double understanding of sculpture – as a form, but also as a function – has an echo that is also double: it both possesses a poetic presence and a practical destination, with it being obvious that the latter is committed to a function of dialogue in the sense that it invites the spectator to experience a determined community sharing of art.

Patent in this proposal are understandings of art and aesthetics which, in their efficiency as a situation for the spectator, go back to the idea (defended by Schiller at the end of the 18th century) that aesthetics represents the passport for the consoling of human communities because it calls up socialization, making human communities become more human through the relationships it proposes among people.

However, it is also important to note that these principles used by Fernanda Fragateiro are achieved through great rigour in the form of the objects she constructs, in the sense that the attention she gives to the finishing off of the elements that make up her sculptures and installations is made material in the tactile physicality of the wood she uses, in the rigour of the spaces she multiplies by the use of mirrors or in the subtle references that she stimulates us to decipher.

In this installation, which she made in 2000, the benches that invite the spectator to sit down are covered with cushions that show paintings by Piet Mondrian. On the bookcase there is a collection of books placed at the visitor’s disposal. The library has only one subject: they are works by artists who committed suicide. If we sit on the benches we become spectator-readers, confronted with our condition.

In putting two works that were born autonomously together (the Bancos and the Estante), Fragateiro creates a situation that shows that double condition of her sculpture and the meaning of which can only be constructed through use. When empty, the sculpture is like a stopped machine that needs to be operated by someone.

Biography
Fernanda Fragateiro studied at the Escola Secundária António Arroio, the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual and at Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. She has exhibited solo since 1981. Since then she has held many solo exhibitions, namely the anthological exhibition Quarto a céu aberto, at the Culturgest (Lisbon, 2003). Her projects are multifaceted and diverse in nature, namely in her interventions on the public space, such as the Jardim das ondas, in the Lisbon Parque das Nações, which was made in 1998 in collaboration with the landscape artist João Gomes da Silva, or, more recently, the multidisciplinary projects Das histórias nascem histórias, inspired by the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner (Centro Cultural de Belém, 2003) and Caixa para guardar o vazio. Between 2004 and 2005 she received a grant from the Fundación Marcelino Botín. She is represented in the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz), in the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto) and in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).

Bibliography
Quarto a céu aberto (cat.), Culturgest, Lisboa, 2003.
Caixa para guardar o vazio (cat.), Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, 2007.