Painter · 1911-2005
Painter
Eva Fernández, born Evarista Fernández Jiménez, was a painter born in La Orotava in 1911 and deceased in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 2005. Her career ranged from 1930s exhibitions to participation in Tenerife's 1960s avant-garde.
Eva Fernández first showed her work publicly in 1930 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife. TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes records a further showing there in 1931, a 1932 trip to Barcelona to exhibit at the Galerías Layetanas, and a practice initially centred on portraits, genre scenes and domestic interiors.
In the 1950s she took part in the Las Palmas Biennials and the Luis de la Cruz Painting Competition. The same museum source records her presence at Madrid's First Hispano-American Art Biennial in 1951 and, the following year, in exhibitions in Florida and New York. These facts establish activity beyond the islands without reducing that career to a single stylistic label.
Her work moved towards abstraction in the 1960s. She joined the group Nuestro Arte and appeared in Eduardo Westerdahl's exhibition Testimonios de Pintura Abstracta. In the early 1970s she returned to figurative painting. The documented trajectory makes it possible to read those shifts as part of a long career, rather than as a fixed opposition between figuration and abstraction.
