Fergus Feehily

  • March 8, 2016 7:00 PM

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).

March 8 – 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. 

Image credit: Fergus Feehily, Otherwheres (for MK), 2013. Oil on wood, cloth. 25 x 20 x 2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo

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This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public each Tuesday from February 23 through April 19, with a specially scheduled presentation on May 17.
 
Lectures begin at 7 pm in the Museum's auditorium. Seating begins at 6:30 pm and is limited to 250; a live broadcast of the presentations is shown in Café Modern for any additional guests. A limited number of tickets (limit two per person) will be available for purchase ($5) from 10 am until 4 pm the day of the lecture online at www.themodern.org/programs/lectures. Free admission tickets (limit two per person) are available at the Modern's information desk beginning at 5 pm on the day of the lecture. The museum galleries remain open until 7 pm on Tuesdays during the series (general admission applies). 
 
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