Fergus Feehily

Feehily has a very good eye, and knows how to make modesty feel major. And that, evidently, is plenty.                                         
Martin Herbert, review of Fergus Feehily at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Frieze (October 2011).

Fergus Feehily is a Berlin- and Helsinki-based artist known for works that present as unassuming in scale, content, and fabrication, but with time and close examination reveal a quiet yet enormous power. While clearly aware of his Post-Minimalist heritage, Feehily is too in touch with the moment of making to be consciously beholden to his predecessors. Feehily’s own push and pull between permanence and impermanence, the deliberate and the accidental, finished and unfinished creates an unidentifiable but exhilarating anxiety that the artist uses to engage the viewer. As described by Martin Herbert in a review for Frieze magazine, “There’s an appealing sense of these works as waiting, each inlaid with their handful of concealed quirks. . . . What strikes you is the operation of a consistent if slightly unpredictable sensibility: these are paintings that feel to have been rigorously tuned, arrested when they’re no longer austere and not yet busy.”

For Tuesday Evenings at the Modern, Fergus Feehily shares the ideas that have determined his career as an intriguing and significant contemporary artist.

Fergus Feehily was born in 1968 in Dublin and lives and works in Berlin and Helsinki. Solo exhibitions include presentations at Capital, San Fransisco, 2015; The Suburban, Milwaukee, 2015; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, 2013 and 2010; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2012 and 2009; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, 2011; Dallas Museum of Art, 2011; Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne, 2010; and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, 2008. His work has also been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including Why not live for Art? II - 9 collectors reveal their treasures, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2013; Painter Painter, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2013; Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio, BOZAR, Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013; Painting Expanded, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2011; and Twenty, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2011. Feehily’s work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. He is currently Professor in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki.


A video recording of this lectures will be available on the Modern's Youtube

Tuesday Evenings