Fernanda Fragateiro
Arratia, Beer, Berlin, Germany
Minimalism prizes objects that maximize a material’s unique character in rigorous form. Site-specific and found objects, commonplaces in contemporary art, both depend on context and the lifespan of evolving artefacts. Fernanda Fragateiro, a Portuguese artist joining the small but solid ranks of Berlin’s Arratia, Beer gallery, works simultaneously in both of these seemingly antagonistic modes, amending and footnoting German cultural history with objects of simple, formal beauty.
Fernanda Fragateiro, MR10 Double Chair, after Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (2009)
In MR10 Double Chair, after Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (2009), Fragateiro reiterates Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s canonical design of the same name: a web of German-made Gütermann silk thread, in shades of blue and grey, links two of Mies’ tubular steel frames, in turn are further linked by extra tubing. The work addresses the design collaborations of the two colleagues and lovers, which, though vaguely acknowledged, are not properly documented by design historians. Lilly Reich, a talented industrial embroiderer and textile designer, taught interior and furniture design at the Bauhaus, and yet remains a little-known contributor in the context of the male-dominated Bauhaus. Fragateiro’s re-evaluation of Reich’s legacy adopts her forbear’s simple, functional aesthetic, using, with a featherweight touch, threads that evoke the female realm to which Reich was repeatedly relegated.
The chair’s taut threads form a block of luminous colour, echoed on the gallery’s back wall by (Not) Connecting #4 (2008). There, bright thread forms a minimalist colour study: its vibrancy and solidity transform its soft, feminine materials, recalling both Fred Sandback’s thread sculptures and, despite material differences, Donald Judd’s sleek chromes.
(Not) Connecting #4’s bands of colour harmonizes, in turn, with (Not) Reading Kursbuch 1 (2009), a vertical tower of the leftist periodical Kursbuch (Railroad Timetable, 1965–75). (Founded by Hans Magnus Enzensburger and Karl Markus Michel, the journal functioned as a mouthpiece for the 1968-generation Extraparliamentary Oppositional Student Movement.) With the titles obscured by a polished steel support, the cheerful palette of each edition’s monochrome paper cover, on one side, contrasts with the pages of the publication on the other. The edge of the feuilleton, cut by the artist, bears the mark of the inaccessible text inside, which speckles the smooth edges with a graphite-like texture. These ‘drawings’, as Fragateiro calls them, inject a soft, delicate side to the bold, monochrome spines, drawing contrasts between interior and exterior, content and exhibition, Minimalism’s traceless production and the handmade.
In Fragateiro’s writings, she enumerates each step by which materials are transformed into a finished work. Books for (Not) Reading Walter Benjamin (2009), for example, were collected by gallerist Euridice Arratia and sent from Berlin to Lisbon, where Fragateiro works. This circulation of objects, however, does not imply circulation of information, as Fragateiro writes of the Kursbuch volumes: ‘Despite my total lack of knowledge of the German language, I found a great intensity in these books.’ The Minimalist casings of Fragateiro’s sculptures obscure and refract each object’s semantic content. For the artist, the accumulated cultural history embeds aesthetic potential within the object, which waits only for a cut or a change of perspective to bring it to the surface.
Anna Altman
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