TONY FEHER
It Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
November 17 – December 23, 2016
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce It Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected, a memorial exhibition of work by Tony Feher on view at the gallery from November 17 through December 23, 2016.
Over a career that spanned more than thirty years, Tony Feher defined a unique place in contemporary art by creating elegant and poetic sculptures and installations using familiar, everyday objects. Feher’s singular ability to embrace the significance and potential in the most humble and simple materials and processes was a cornerstone of his formal practice.
It Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected debuts Feher’s last body of work, a series of vibrant, intensely colored monochrome paintings, alongside a smaller group of stained plywood works made during the same period. Shown together, the two cycles of paintings posit questions about the relationship of the pictorial to the abstract and of craft to art, instigating a conversation about painting and its genres—the monochrome, the relief, the still-life, and the landscape.
On view publicly for the first time, the exhibition also includes over 700 drawings on notebook paper, napkins, and placemats dating from 1985 – 2013. Presented as one work, they provide an in-depth exploration of his thought process—from quick sketches, to studies, floorplans and diagrams for installations—and reveal the depth and complexity of Feher’s creative vision. The exhibition is curated by Feher’s close friends and fellow artists Andrea Blum, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka. It is presented in cooperation with Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco, where a concurrent exhibition featuring a series of visual vignettes, groupings of artworks from different moments throughout Feher’s career that illustrate an ongoing dialogue thread will be on view.
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 important international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The Art Institute of Chicago.
An in-depth retrospective of Feher’s work, organized by Claudia Schmuckli, premiered at the Des Moines Art Center in 2012. The exhibition traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Akron Art Museum. A fully illustrated monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. was published to accompany the survey.