Portals at Dublin Art Book Fair 2022

November 24 - December 4, 2022

Dublin Art Book Fair 2022: A Caring Matter

backbonebooks shows Fergus Feehily’s Portals, 2022 at the Dublin Art Book Fair. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents Dublin Art Book Fair 2022: A Caring Matter (DABF22), the twelfth edition of Ireland’s only art book fair, sponsored by Henry J Lyons. Taking place from 24 November to 4 December 2022, the gallery is transformed into an art book fair where you can enjoy an impressive range of artist books, curated book titles, independent publishers, talks and events in a unique atmosphere.

Rosie Lynch, Creative Director of Workhouse Union in Kilkenny, is DABF22 Guest Curator. Her theme, A Caring Matter, is explored through the books themselves and an eleven-day programme of talks, events and workshops. At the crux is the idea of care, considered in poetic and imminent ways through the role of formal and informal publishing, and how we build communities of solidarity and belonging to how we care for our buildings and towns. Lynch’s programme puts care at the centre of how we think about society, our environment, how we work, live and make art.

Dublin Art Book Fair 2022: A Caring Matter is sponsored by Henry J Lyons and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Dublin Art Book Fair

backbonebooks

Portals at Super BOOKS 3, Haus der Kunst, Munich

Portals features as part of backbonebooks presentation at Super BOOKS 3, Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Super BOOKS 3

November 11 - November 12, 2022, 12 – 8 pm

In November, Haus der Kunst will host the third edition of Super BOOKS. Over two days, artists, designers, and alternative publishers will show their publications. Super BOOKS was organized for the first time in 2019 at Haus der Kunst as part of the exhibition "Archives in Residence: AAP Archiv Künstlerpublikationen" curated by Sabine Brantl. The project aims to be considered part of the tradition of independent showcases for artists’ publications that have formed in the context of the international, post-avant-garde art scene since the 1960s.

Super BOOKS is a collaborative project between Haus der Kunst, AAP Archive Artist Publications, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Curated by Sabine Brantl with Hubert Kretschmer, Lilian Landes, Veronika Günther and Martin Schmidl.

Super BOOKS 3

Haus der Kunst

Art School: A Beautiful Uncertainty

The text, Art School: A Beautiful Uncertainty is included in Rethinking the crit: New pedagogies in design education, which has just been published by Routledge, 2022.

Edited by Patrick Flynn, Maureen O'Connor, Mark Price and Miriam Dunn.

Maureen O’Connor, Johan De Walsche, Rosie Parnell, Collette Nolan, Bill O’Flynn, Mia Roth-Čerina, Caterina Barioglio, Daniele Campobenedetto, Kathryn H. Anthony, Donal Moloney, Carmen Tomas, Martin Gledhill, Sevgi Türkkan, Rashida Ng, Lindy Osborne Burton, Hermie Delport, Jolanda Morkel, Michele Gorman and Alice Clancy and contributions from Johanna Cleary, Lorena Dondea, Patricia Ruisch, Sam Carse and Sarah Sheridan.

Rethinking the Crit

Half Doors, Lulu, Mexico City

September 10 - November 5, 2022

The impossible elegance of Fergus Feehily’s painting. Its economy both of scale and means, humble (but is it?) and domestic-sized and made of the stuff of the everyday. Its humor, how apparently playful it is, even a touch absurd, and yet, deeply thoughtful and totally rigorous. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful and unhinged? I mean it’s a broken piece of wood sutured with a dirty piece of medical tape, which is just starting to peel off (oh no!). But it is so utterly serious at the same time. Look at that artist-made metallic frame. And the well, let’s admit it, opulent amber-hue…. How much of the history of 20th century art and painting is subsumed in this gesture? Duchamp, Burri, Fontana, probably more, and yet, it kind of just disappears before the unremitting, if casual pulchritude of this object. Elsewhere, fluorescent daubs of paint skittering gaily around a slate grey surface, as if applied in a state of elated distraction. Really? Is he fucking with me? Foutage de gueule? But look at the frame. The colors of it. There’s nothing distracted about any of this. And the box on the shelf? Is it a painting? It is. Look at it closely. The glittering, multi-colored sides. The importance of the role this part of painting plays in the practice of the artist cannot be overstated. Never mind the oddly sensuous surface and striations of the plywood and its almost accidental pictorial quality, which is nevertheless perfectly compelling as a picture. But then again, maybe the plywood are the sides? Conceptual, so to speak, painting at its finest, this work is blessedly devoid of the dourness associated with conceptualism. Consider the warmth and brightness of it. This is the joy of contemplation. Of painting. Of painting that is not painting. But really is. Much more so than it is conceptualism, in any event.

Lulu

Equation, Fergus Feehily & Günther Förg, June, Berlin

August 4 - August 27, 2022

Equation, Günther Förg & Fergus Feehily, curated by Camila McHugh

Something Günther Förg found compelling in exhibiting photographs was their reflective surfaces: “I have often observed how visitors to my installation try to find a position in which they don’t have a reflection in the glass. They want to see the photo as neutrally as possible, but that is almost impossible, for one can’t avoid the reflections.” For a show at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1986, he even glazed his framed photographs to accentuate this mirroring. Such attentiveness to perception imbues his works with fragility. Not because he elevates the position of the viewer—far from it—but instead because he draws out the inevitably of this clunky viewer-object contract. And its essential precarity.

He was similarly concerned with the way in which architecture occupied space—formally, as well as in a mode laden with history and connotation. His 1985 photograph Das Detail vergrößern (3) is part of a sequence of photos he took of Munich’s Glyptothek, in tandem with his photographic dissection of the nearby Pinakothek. It was a fascination with Villa Malaparte in Capri, and particularly how it had been documented, that first moved Förg to pick up a camera. Architecture with Fascist or Modernist inflection would become his frequent subject throughout the 1980s and 90s, and an attention to gridded window panes and spiral staircases another through line. This photograph shows a tight, vertical crop of Glyptothek’s interior dome, which, like the rest of the interior neoclassical museum, was originally built in marble in the early 19th century, and was rebuilt with red brick and painted with a light plaster after it was mostly destroyed during the Second World War. In a characteristically hazy, almost blurred focus, Förg’s dilating composition also lays power structures bare.

Fergus Feehily’s painting Dee, 2022 also plays with the possibility of reflection, though you can’t quite see yourself in the sheets of textured, shiny aluminum and pink, orange and silver glitter fabric that are fastened to a thin box shape with carpet tacks. But the work does invite a kind of continuous reorientation—it is seductive, strange, self-consciously ordinaryl. Feehily had also been thinking of English occultist and alchemist John Dee and his black spirit mirror: a lustrous surface that the Elizabethan court astronomer employed to summon visions of the spirit world. Paintings can be portals and Feehily’s resolutely small-scale work makes a claim for an artwork’s ability to encompass or engender something like a universe. Take the subtly expansive quality of the methodical and multicolored dabs of oil on wood that comprise Ever Loving, 2021 or the pulsating stars in blue on yellow in North Star, 2008. Both of these works make use of found frames, emblematic of Feehily’s interest in dragging intriguing fragments from the world around him onto the picture plane. Or perhaps more precisely, making this found material the picture plane. Counter to Förg’s consistently serial approach to artmaking, Feehily pays keen attention to a friction between artworks. What questions has this work raised that the next might broach? Or how might the next work attempt to embody something entirely other to the previous? Like Förg, on the other hand, Feehily is invested in painting as a proposition that is unconstrained by material parameters of paint or canvas, as an ongoing negotiation with both a weighty history and boundless possibility.

Meandering reflection on these two artists could take many directions, but their work also resists explication. These guys are the real deal.

June

A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

July 30 - September 3, 2022

Tom Allen, Sophie Barber, Michael Berryhill, Dike Blair, Varda Caivano, Luz Carabaño, Lois Dodd, Fergus Feehily, Anna Glantz, Federico Herrero, Ulala Imai, Lauren Spencer King, Jennifer J. Lee, Daniel Graham Loxton, Paulo Monteiro, Alexandra Noel, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Paul P., Santiago de Paoli, Dana Powell, Kristopher Raos, Eleanor Ray, Louise Sartor, Anna Schachinger, Shana Sharp, Hiroshi Sugito, Sean Sullivan, Altoon Sultan, Hayley Tompkins, Tinus Vermeersch, Tyler Vlahovich, Owen Westberg, Yui Yaegeshi, Zhiliang Zhao.

Chis Sharp Gallery

Yūgen, CCA, Andratx

July 30 - September 24, 2022

Aleana Egan, Fergus Feehily, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Martin Healy

The Japanese word yūgen describes “an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses that are too mysterious and deep for words.” Another concept important in Japanese aesthetics - mono no aware - is literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things."

Underlying these concepts is a philosophical understanding of the world as in flux and impermanent and suggests a non-linguistic form of comprehension.  There are resonances of these concepts in each of the artist’s practices: an interest in and awareness of pace, duration and time and how these things are experienced and become manifested in different ways. There is also a sense of ‘slow time’ in the artists’ approaches to making work - where a convergence or co-existence of different times in objects, places and texts form a basis from which to generate sculpture, photographs and paintings.

Though the English language does not present concise translations for such resonant Japanese philosophies, language matters to the artists in different ways as does the non or pre linguistic which is intrinsic to both the generation and the reading of works.

CCA

Portals at Under the Leaf, Helsinki

May 14 – May 15, 2022

Portals, Feehily’s new artist book is available at Under the Leaf, Helsinki 2022.

Over forty local & international artists & publishers will participate in the first edition of Under the Leaf Art Book Fair in Helsinki: publications, installations, gigs, poetry readings and pop-up bicycle café. Monitoimitila o

Line-up for Saturday evening: Shia Conlon, Heta Bilaletdin, Victor Gogly & Laua Rip

backbonebooks

backbonebooks at Miss Read, Berlin

April 29 – May 1, 2022

Portals, Feehily’s new artist book is available at Miss Read, Berlin Art Book Festival 2022.

Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair 2022 will take place on April 29th to May 1st at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and will bring together a wide selection of 300+ publishers, art periodicals and artists/authors.

In conjunction, the Conceptual Poetics Day will explore the imaginary border between visual art and literature.

backbonebooks

Cameos Calls Dust, Galeie Christian Lethert, Köln

April 8 – June 4, 2022

Galerie Christian Lethert is pleased to present the solo exhibition Cameos Calls Dust by artist Fergus Feehily in which he subtly intervenes in the architecture of the exhibition space.

Feehily gave us these notes, remarking that they may or may not be useful:

A man stood outside a store, he was dressed as most Hare Krishna devotees in shades of orange, and tried to talk to anyone who passed. He was under a grey Northern sky. Was he in this street or was he in New Delhi?

I have long been interested in the lone actor, it could be snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, Harold Lloyd hanging from a teetering arm of a clock or the writer, such as Elizabeth Taylor, sitting alone at her desk.

Elizabeth Taylor wrote in her 1947 novel, A View of the Harbour: No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on? The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if “vague” will do better than “faint”, or “faint” than “vague”, and what is to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game.

Galerie Christian Lethert

Portals, backbonebooks, Berlin

A new publication published by backbonebooks, Berlin.

Soft cover, 14.8 x 21 cm, 36 pages, indigo on 90gm arena white, metallic saddle stitching.

Edition of 100 copies.

backbonebooks, 2022

15€ plus p&p

“Always now and always here and always me: that’s what it’s like for you.

Now always and here always and me always: this is what it’s like for me.

Now. Here. Me.“

Short excerpt from Jerusalem. Alan Moore, 2016.

&zines, Zarinbal Khoshbakht, Cologne

A compilation of contemporary artists’ zines

Martin Belou, Victor Boullet, Merlin Carpenter, Nicholas Cheveldave, Masaya Chiba, Magnus Frederik Clausen, Penny Davenport, Michaela Eichwald, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Dag Erik Elgin, Fergus Feehily, Francesca Gabbiani, Athene Galiciadis, Joanne Greenbaum, Tom Hardwick-Allan, Masanao Hirayama, Agata Ingarden, Nicolas Jasmin, Brian Kennon, Takuro Kuwata, Christoph Meier, Sophie Nys, B. Ingrid Olson, Sarah Ortmeyer, David Ostrowski, Julia Scher, Amy Sillman, Odessa Straub, Zin Taylor, Ariane Vonmoos, Yui Yaegashi

Display by Ulrike Schulze

Published by Antenne Publishing, At Last Books, Black Pages, Bunk Club, Frenetic Happiness, Innen, Misako & Rosen, The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, Ve.Sch Kunstverein, Weinspach & self-published

October 22 - November 13, 2021

Organized by Tom Lingnau, Weinspach

Hosted by Zarinbal Khoshbakht, Cologne

The show’s interest is in single artist’s statements utilizing the zine format as it’s own exhibition space according to each artist’s individual practice. The compilation thrives to show a diversity of contemporary positions within the medium, whether it is photocopied, offset printed or risographed. Further sculptural, economical and social implications of publishing are mirrored with the inclusion of certain publishers providing their own curatorial framework as well as within the display work by Cologne-based artist Ulrike Schulze

Project archive on edcat

Exhibition page on edcat

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, September – October 2021

Review of You & i are Earth by Frank Wasser.

You & i are Earth edited by Fergus Feehily, comprises a collection of texts that share painting as a starting point. Many of the essays lead us through a diverse range of thoughts and interests related to memory, music, history, literature, and personal experience, often taking note of the seemingly incidental yet pivotal. With contributions by Annie May Demozay, John Graham, Jack Hanley, Mary Heilmann, Naotaka Hiro, Fergus Feehily, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Paul P., Eleanor Ray, Luis Sagasti, Carole Seborovski, Mark Swords, Stephen Truax, and Joost van den Bergh.

Published by Paper Visual Art , March 2021

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Particularities, X Museum, Beijing

Tom Allen, Lucas Arruda, Sophie Barber, Gareth Cadwallader, Fergus Feehily, Lewis Hammond, Brook Hsu, Jennifer J. Lee, Paulo Monteiro, Alexandra Noel, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Paul P., Santiago de Paoli, Elizabeth Peyton, Dana Powell, Eleanor Ray, Louise Sartour, Anna Schachinger, Hayley Tompkins, Yui Yaegeshi

September 5 - December 5, 2021

Curated by Chris Sharp

Curatorial Assistant Jinger Xu

X Museum