Magdalena Fernandez and the ethos of digital geometric abstraction

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Sara Buoso
University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6542-8716

Abstract

This paper deals with the work of the Venezuelan artist Magdalena Fernandez whose practice emerges in the 1990s to explore the potentiality of the language of geometric abstraction at the intersection of visual arts and design. Whilst revisiting the legacy of Modernism through a Minimalist aesthetics, Fernandez contributes to the formulation of a grammar of geometric abstraction which articulates by means of digital and multimedia practices. In this regard, emblematic is the mobile painting, 2iPM009, 2009, in which Fernandez extends the canons of formal composition through a multiplicity of registers that integrates spatial, structural, and graphic investigations, all supported by a system of computation that uses digital animation techniques in analogy with sound and light effects through the format of a video-installation. This paper examines the artist’s interest in rethinking the pictorial language of modernist geometric abstraction through a multimedia language, questioning about agency and legacy.

Keywords: Geometric abstraction, Ethics, Genealogy, Ecology, Animation, Sound, Digitalization, Multimedia language

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