Rita Fernández is a Mexican artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA: Painting). She holds a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. At the intersection of the visual and the conceptual, Fernández’s practice explores the tension between material and meaning by raising questions about the self, womanhood and identity through material-based inquiries.

Through a deeply personal engagement with the body, she uses her own experience as a starting point to examine broader questions of materiality, gender and self-representation. She approaches self- portraiture not as a genre but as a matrix, a framework for exploring an everchanging subject. This approach allows her to produce works that fall within a broader narrative system, each piece a node in an ever-expanding exploration of the self.

For Fernández, materials are not just vehicles for representation, but active participants in the narrative. At GlogauAIR, Fernández is creating a body of work that entertains one of Clive Cazeaux’s ideas, the metaphoricity of materials. In these works, she incorporates personal materials (such as underwear, tights, bedsheets and hair) into her paintings; not as add-ons but as mediums. These elements become metaphors for her lived experience, serving as both literal components of the artwork and symbolic extensions of the self.