Patricia Fernández Carcedo Burgos, Spain 1980

The practice of Patricia Fernández Carcedo (Burgos, 1980) unfolds between painting, wood carving, and installation, through which she articulates an archive of heterogeneous materials –carved wood, bone, ceramics, textiles, and correspondence– where inherited memory is gathered, rewritten, and reorganized, its fragmentary condition assumed as the material of the work itself. At the center of that archive lies the x-shaped, or star-shaped, mark that her grandfather, José Luis Carcedo (1923–2023), carved into boxes and furniture, a gesture the artist reads as a form of writing and as a record of time and duration deposited in matter.

Her grandfather's carving belongs to the trade of the carver and the carpenter, an anonymous and functional knowledge that art history has kept outside its account. Incorporating it into her work as structure, frame, and language, Fernández Carcedo moves it into the field of art, and with it the artisan, who acquires the position of author. In Untitled (frames) (2020), commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a selection of Goya's Caprichos is presented alongside reproductions of her grandfather's carvings. The motifs of the etchings, turned into carving, are further inserted among fragments of works he left unfinished. The canonical printmaker and the anonymous artisan come to occupy the same hierarchy in a radical act of inclusion and horizontality, opening a space where fine arts, decorative arts, and craft coexist on the ground of making. That horizontality extends to the intimate, which in her work attains the same rank as the great themes, against a tradition that has tied artistic value to the universal, to the autonomous, and to an idea of purity removed from biography. The domestic, the inherited, and the personal exist in her work as forms of knowledge, and their entry into the museum alters the criteria by which the institution establishes value. Operating with the means and within the spaces of the mainstream, Fernández Carcedo enacts a subversion from within that complicates and reframes the canon of art history. Rooted in her origins in Spain, her practice opens toward a proposition that extends beyond her own lifetime.

Box (a proposition for ten years) (2012–2022) carries this conception of the archive into the terrain of duration. The piece was conceived as an agreement with Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, and began with a carved walnut box and a letter of eleven propositions that functioned as a contract. Among its conditions were the obligation to care for the work with ungloved hands, inverting the conservation protocols that govern the relation to the art object and giving value to touch (for the intimacy and immediacy it involves, over the sterility of gloves), and the obligation to keep adding objects over the years. For a decade, the box took in paintings, ceramics, correspondence, and objects contributed by the artist, by Chung, and by other invited participants. Among them is the model for Bone Ship, built from the bones of the animals she ate and conceived as the model for a vessel to be built, after the artist's death, from her own bones and those of whoever wishes to form part of it. Both the box and the ship depend on others in order to be completed. The relationship between artist and gallerist, usually mediated by transaction, is founded here on trust, and the contract becomes a commitment of mutual care and shared authorship that extends beyond the lifetime of those who sign it. The archive, an instrument of authority over the past, becomes an open structure in which the biographical, motherhood included, enters with the same status as the objects.

In her recent paintings, the archive moves from recovering what existed to projecting a speculative cosmology, exploring the possibility of alternative realities halfway between relic and vision, anchored in handwork and in the present tense. Across fields of pink and earth tones, biomorphic forms, seeds, and filaments compose routes toward other spaces, while the carved walnut frames, inlaid with ebony, abalone, bone, redwood, or alder, extend the painting into the object. In Rattle after seed storm (2026), two organic forms that evoke the rattle of the title, linked to one another and traversed by a diagram of arcs and circles, place the seed at the center of a cartography at once cosmic and biological. In Bone ship (Kala) (2026), the vessel that emerged in Box (a proposition for ten years) reappears with a skeletal figure on board and a hull lined with buttons, connected by a vertical line to a small square form that recalls the x-shaped mark. The ship, textile inheritance, and the grandfather's writing converge in a single image. Both Bone ship (Kala) and In the role of shadow (2026) incorporate into their frames pieces of pine carved by José Luis Carcedo alongside the artist's own walnut carving, joining different generations in a single piece that gives form to a memory in continuous transformation, in which later generations receive the weave of identity, complicate it, and carry it forward.

Patricia Fernández Carcedo studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (2002) and at the California Institute of the Arts (2010). She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and Whistle in Seoul. Her awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), the Pollock-Krasner Grant (2017), and the City of Los Angeles COLA-IMAP grant (2023). She has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts (2014), Fondazione Antonio Ratti (2017), Récollets in Paris (2013), AIR Sandnes (2023), and Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid (2026). Her work is in the collection of LACMA.

Portrait photograph credit: Ian James