TONY FEHER
June 4 – July 22, 2022
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Tony Feher, on view June 4 through July 22, 2022.
Over a career spanning more than thirty years, Tony Feher’s unique body of work recasts the utilitarian and ubiquitous into sculptures of elegant, ambiguous sublimity. The elements composing his structures and installations often include found materials culled from the everyday, items typically procured and consumed for one-time use before being discarded; jars, bottles, cords, containers, packing supplies, hangers, and marbles are only a handful of the various objects that appear within his works. Rejecting ideas of material hierarchy, Feher foregrounds the formal properties and aesthetic potential of these items against their physical disposability.
It is through this broad and inventive range of compositional formations that one fully conceives of Feher’s poetic interpretations of color, size, and space. At both small and large-scale, his sculptures and installations configure themselves to fully live within the space they inhabit. Jars positioned on shelves, crates arranged on the floor, and bottles hanging from ceilings are as idiosyncratic and intimate as our own quotidian encounters with these items outside gallery walls. Within this sense of familiar chaos, Feher’s work moves beyond a specific referentiality towards a transcendent, compassionate archaeology of life.
Tony Feher (1956-2016) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas and resided in New York City. Feher’s work can be found in prominent international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, and The Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
An in-depth retrospective of Feher’s work was organized by Claudia Schmuckli and presented at the Des Moines Art Center, IL, in 2012. The exhibition traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, TX; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Akron Art Museum, OH. A fully illustrated monograph was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. to accompany the survey.