ANA MARIA HERNANDO | A Sense of Air

“As background, I am a multidisciplinary artist and my work focuses on the feminine, using empathy to make the invisible visible, and to question our preconceptions of the other — including nature and the earth — their worth, and value. I paint and draw flowers, not only out of mesmerized wonder for their presence on earth, but also as a response to an imposed hierarchy of what art is supposed to be, and against the labels of ‘decorative,’ ‘inconsequential’ and ‘superficial’ that have been historically equated to the art of women. I also make large-scale installations that often incorporate a variety of handmade, crocheted, or embroidered fabric objects. In my more recent work, I explore color and movement in tulle textural ‘paintings’ that offer a feminine rejoinder to historical movements in abstractions. I use a wide palette of bold and subtle color choices to meet a sense of the delicate, as the material becomes radiant with light upon its undulating and curvilinear surfaces. These framed textile works and installations unapologetically contradict and embrace the inherent lavishness of the tulle, alongside shared vibratory color, and spatial concerns.

In my tulle pieces and installations, the fields of color, texture and pattern develop through a single gesture — weaving tulle — repeated over and over. Tulle, seen as a prototypically feminine material, alludes to a fantasized message of happy fragility, where all is better when women delegate their own agency, and with it, their power. I deeply rebel against this notion, using the same fabric itself to express my rebellion. Presenting tulle in a somatic and visual abstraction, I bring it forward in such abundance that softness becomes less a discreet quality and more a function of power, both formally and symbolically.

My new and recent work is reminiscent of the series I produced during my year-long residency in France at La Napoule Art Foundation. There I amassed yard after yard of colorful tulle to cascade from the historic château’s second story windows, and all over, inside the buildings, and around the gardens, using the architecture as the relational subject for the fabric. Several of my tulle pieces engage with the spatial voice of architecture to disarm our automatic rendering of invisibility to these spaces, and to awaken what we have taken for granted: a ruffled rim softens a corner in brilliant orange and pink twists of tulle; a splurge of color occupies a small spot on a very large wall. I take doorways, edges, skylights, emptiness, and dress them with my tulle pieces. The work gives voice to a transitional space, the edge of emptiness, utilitarian and invisible but indispensable in our need for its existence. It is an invitation to seeing with the body.

My sculptural pieces are directly aligned with the notion of abundance, which I view as an unstoppable force of life that transforms and moves forward in living things, no matter how humankind might evolve or devolve. In love with the natural world and often informed by it, my works have always provoked within me a narrative that invites dialogue beyond the formal to also show a sense of wonder at the aliveness of being. I am interested in these unacknowledged feminine forces of work, and in the feminine uncontained. So full of love, perseverance, clarity, generosity, and joy, it wants for nothing. It is presence itself.”

• Ana María Hernando

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “A Sense of Air,” Ana María Hernando’s seventh solo exhibition and like her other exhibitions, this offering includes joyful visual delights with a volumetric, suspended sculpture and new, installed wall forms. Hernando’s way of working has garnered her tremendous accolades nationally and internationally in recent years, including the acquisition of a large-scale, flowing orange tulle sculpture, entitled Nadar en el diluvio de aguas caldas (To Swim in the Deluge of Warm Waters), into the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts which followed a remarkable multi-part, NYC outdoor installation with the Madison Square Park Conservancy, among other notable exhibitions.                 

Ever mindful of how the work of women can be perceived on many levels, Hernando employs visual or tactile elements in her work that would likely be labeled as “feminine.” This includes her use of tulle, a fabric most often associated with brides and ballerinas, but in Hernando’s hands, the billowing yards of the material are assertively present with her approach to gather, twist, knot and shape the tulle. The cloud-like ellipse of ruffled edges in the suspended Cosas que la esperanza me trae (Things that Hope Brings Me) invokes a child-like wonder. In Ternura Electiric (Electric Tenderness), the carefully shaped rectangle of saturated hues become a chromatic exemplar with intense citron blending into a charged blue that centrally merges into a vibratory green. The new oblong wall sculptures elbow into the gallery space with undeniable aliveness; their mounded and knotted construction is both ordered and disordered, perhaps paying loose homage to the Fibonacci sequence that shapes phenomenal natural forms – an upended mathematical order tweaked into joy. As a rejoinder to accepted masculine dominance in abstraction, Hernando once again shows there is undeniable strength in a feminine interpretation with a collective rising lift of air beneath it.

In her work, Ana María Hernando emphasizes the importance of community with concern for all humanity and always wishes to share her multi-disciplinary work both in practice and on exhibition. She states, “My art invites viewers to question our preconceptions of the other – including nature and the earth – their worth, and their value. It is my deeply felt intention to illuminate the thirst of the heart, and what occurs behind the veil, the pattern and the labor of our lives.”

Ana Maria Hernando, a prestigious 2023 Joan Mitchel Fellow, has a BFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA, a BS in Education from the Profesorado Eccleston in Buenos Aires, Argentina and studied at the Museum School in Boston, MA, and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon. Hernando’s multidisciplinary practice with textile influences has been recognized with numerous grants and awards, including representing the State of Colorado at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Women to Watch 2024, S*Park Resource Artist fellowship at Redline, Denver, and the Prix Henry Clews from LaNapoule Art Foundation. Her work has been shown throughout the US as well as internationally including in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO, Château de La Napoule Art Foundation, La Napoule France, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO, International Center of Bethlehem, West Bank, CU Art Museum, Boulder, CO, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO and Building Bridges, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is included in private, public, and corporate collections such as the University of Colorado, Boulder, Nordstrom Corporation, San Francisco, CA, and Banco Patricios, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hernando’s  group presentations include exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, ID, The Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX, and the Lilley Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2026), and was featured in the 2019 documentary entitled “Undomesticated” by Amie Knox of A bar K Productions. In 2024, Hernando’s multi-sculpture installation entitled "To Let the Sky Know/ Dejar que el cielo sepa," was on view as part of the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s anniversary exhibition celebration in New York City, and “My Longing Doesn’t Quiet / Mi añoranza no se calla” was on view in Aspen, Colorado, at the Rubey Park Transit Center and Sister Cities Plaza as part of a temporary public art installation.