Beso, 2015-2022 Patinated bronze 12.5 x 15 x 55 cm
Agustín Hernández Navarro (b. 1924- d. 2022, Mexico City) was an architect, sculptor and poet based in Mexico City. In an oeuvre that spanned decades, Hernández fused Mesoamerican forms with Corbusian volumetry to create one-of-a-kind buildings simultaneously monolithic and skybound, both futuristic and informed by the past, as alien as resolutely Mexican – that will outlast him with timeless monumentality.
Agustín Hernández was perhaps one of the last living masters of 20th-century Modernism — although his was a Modernism with a gloriously idiosyncratic twist. The Mexican architect boasted an impressive range of built work that serves as a link between grand mid-century urban-planning visions and formally adventurous high-tech fantasies. The Heroico Colegio Militar (military academy), completed in 1976 in Mexico City (with Manuel González Rul), is perhaps his most important built project, combining indigenous Mexican tectonics and Modernist rationalism. Other significant works include the Meditation Center in Cuernavaca, Casa Álvarez, Casa Amalia, The Folkloric Ballet School, Casa Neckelmann, Casa en el Aire, and his very own studio, Praxis, to mention just a few.
His architectural and sculptural work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York, the Tamayo Museum, Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City, among others.