Overview

Curated by Jesús Fuenmayor, this exhibition explores how two pioneering sculptors, Valerie Brathwaite and José Gabriel Fernández, reveal how abstraction can speak to identity, sensuality, and the complicated histories that shape the Americas. Trinidad-born Brathwaite channels the landscapes of her childhood and the ecological tensions of urban life into luminous organic forms. Her stones, flowers, and “soft bodies” pulse with the sensual vitality of nature, shaped from clay, plaster, cement, fabric, and color that suggest both the Caribbean’s exuberance and its fragility.  

Fernández, born in Caracas, turns to the stylized gestures and physicality of bullfighting to explore masculinity and the veiled layers of homoeroticism embedded within it. His ultra-modern sculptural abstractions—derived from the curves, tension, and theatricality of the capote (bullfighter’s cape)—reveal identity as something performed, coded, and concealed. Together, the artists demonstrate how form bore personal and cultural histories long before such concerns were named or theorized as identity politics.

Brathwaite and Fernández invite viewers to slow down and consider how abstraction absorbs the forces that shape life. Their practices show that form is never neutral; it is charged with lived experience and shaped by the worlds the artists carry with them.