Two Coats of Paint

Fergus Feehily: The Horse and The Rider

Joe Fyfe, February 5, 2025 1:39 pm

“Feehily has published several small books, pamphlets, and brochures that touch on aspects of his works in relation to things in the world and a full-scale catalogue of 230 pages with color plates on coated, shiny paper interspersed with light, pastel-tinted dull paper stock on which are printed two essays by others, comments by the artist, images of found art, notes, and other relevant images, published by Zolo Press in 2023. His artworks have been exhibited regularly in Europe, Tokyo, Mexico City, and New Zealand, and in American museums in Texas and Minnesota, but New York has bypassed him for at least a decade.”

Two Coats of Paint

Pond, Chalk, Universe

Pond, Chalk, Universe is a day of events hosted by exhibiting artist Fergus Feehily on the occasion of his solo exhibition, Fortune House at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 13 December 2024 — 23 February 2025.

Pond, Chalk, Universe (Part I)

25 January 2025, 11:15–12:30

Exhibiting artist Fergus Feehily leads a walk through the city with readings from his book, The Horse and the Rider.

Meeting under the Eason’s clock on O’Connell Street, a small group of people will join the artist Fergus Feehily to walk across the city visiting several undisclosed locations. Here, the artist will lead readings from his new artist book The Horse and The Rider – written as an integral part of his exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Feehily is a kind of flâneur, both metaphorically in his artistic practice and in actuality, this has led the artist’s desire to bring viewers on this walk.

Participants on the walk are invited to attend Pond, Chalk, Universe (Part II).

Pond, Chalk, Universe (Part II)

25 January 2025, 2–5:15pm

Join us at the gallery for an afternoon of talks, readings, a lecture and discussions, hosted by artist Fergus Feehily on the occasion of his solo exhibition, Fortune House at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Stephen Ellcock is an online collector and curator of images, as well as a writer and researcher and creator of a virtual museum on Facebook and Instagram. This event brings together artists of different generations and locations, including artists Annie May Demozay and Aino Lintunen – both of whom the artist first met while teaching in Helsinki, the artist himself, and TBG+S Programme Curator Michael Hill who worked closely with Feehily towards this project.

This event is the second part of Pond, Chalk, Universe, a day of events hosted by exhibiting artist Fergus Feehily on the occasion of his solo exhibition, Fortune House at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 13 December 2024 – 23 February 2025.

Fortune House is situated in deep winter, taking place on both sides of the solstice, continuing into brighter days. This changing context draws on ideas of illumination, bridging time and memory through the exhibition. The title conjures a vision of a site where luck, prosperity, or a glimpse into the future might be found.

Fergus Feehily born in Dublin now lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Lulu, Mexico City (2022); La Maison de Rendez-vous, Brussels (2020); Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne. (2019) and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo (2018). His work has been shown at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art; X Museum, Beijing; Tokyo Opera City; Capital, San Francisco; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. In 2023, a major new monograph on the artist was published by Zolo Press, Mexico City/Brussels.

Stephen Ellcock is a collector and renowned curator whose online ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ – an ever-expanding, virtual museum of art that is open to all via social media – has so far attracted more than 635,000 followers worldwide. Publications include Underworlds (2023) and The Cosmic Dance (2022) and Element: Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces (2024) published by Thames & Hudson. Internationally acclaimed dance company BalletBoyz staged an adaptation of England on Fire, picture-edited by Ellcock, at Sadlers Wells in 2023.

Aino Lintunen, who was born in Jyväskylä, Finland, is a visual artist based in Helsinki. In her work, she uses methods of process-based painting, drawing and writing. She is interested in edges rather than cores, and navigates towards uncertainty. Lintunen has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki (MFA 2022), Aalto University (MA 2016) and the Slade School of Fine Arts, London. Lintunen is also a member of the artist-run initiative SIC, located in an old train station in Helsinki.

Annie May Demozay reads and talks a lot. She is deeply interested in all sorts of things but she is fickle and the things she finds interesting are always changing. Sometimes the things she reads and talks about end up in her writing - sometimes they do not. She considers herself a conduit and is interested in the past and communing with the dead. Her writing is sporadic as she is an idler with a poor imagination. She spends more time on her bicycle than slaving over sentences. She is more interested in talking than writing anyway. Although lately she has been memorising poetry which she recites whilst riding her bicycle (she shouts Philip Larkin at the hills). She is interested in the vernacular and things that follow one thing after another. She is interested in folk approaches to art making, in things that are passed down and altered, in building on what has gone before. She lives in Scotland.

Michael Hill is Programme Curator at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Event Location Description: This event will take place across multiple spaces at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Entrance through our street facing gallery, rooms accessible by stairs or lift, semi accessible bathroom available.

For further access information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

The Horse and The Rider

I have written a new book, The Horse and The Rider, which “brings together many reflections on thinking about and experiencing art, and alternative ways of seeing and understanding artistic values. The artist's self-reflective writing moves between disciplines, chronologies and geographies. This pocket-sized volume collapses worlds of understanding by linking Ursula K. Le Guin and Napalm Death’s expositions of truth, and the cosmic universality of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. Elsewhere, Sun Ra’s abandonment of knowing is related to the lost meaning of ancient Irish artefacts such as the Corleck Head carved stone.”

The Horse and The Rider is published as part of Fergus Feehily’s exhibition, Fortune House at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, December 2024 – February 2025. 

All proceeds go to Dublin Simon Community.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2024.
160 x 111 mm
Paperback
80pp.
Designed by Michael Hill.

Purchase

The Year in Review

Highlights 2024:

Memories of the year are sketchy but here are some things: Listening to Sway of the Verses on NTS; reading John Banville’s Benjamin Black novels, something I began in the warmth of the summer; talking to my son about gaming, ethics and the world; Mike Kelley at K21, lunch at Kushi-Tei of Tokyo, Düsseldorf; Jochen Lempert’s mysterious photographs at BQ, Berlin; Paul P at KW, Berlin and coffee with Scott Treleaven, as was outdoor conversations with Alexander Gorlizki and Aino Lintunen; visiting the amphitheater at Trier; Khanate’s brutal and beautiful set at Berghain, Berlin; Rebecca Warren at Max Hetzler, Berlin; Hallie Rubenhold’s deeply humane The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper; walking on Shooter’s Hill in London with Michael Hill; Matt Connors at Goldsmiths, London; having time to look at Inge Mahn’s drawings over an extended period of time and the hours spent at the Bibliothek Günther Förg in Weidingen; Portals, Art and Spirituality at the Swedenborg Society, London; Annie May Demozay’s Cry Boy Cry’s echoes were felt through my year; Tommy Tiernan being interviewed on the Bill Burr podcast; Trails Of Uncertainty: Mark Buckeridge & Vivienne Dick at the Complex, Dublin; Séance at House, Berlin; Tal R at Max Hetzler, Berlin; Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others at the Museum of Photography, Dublin; Mark Swords and Alan Phelan at the Casino Marino, Dublin and seeing the echo of Paul McKinley’s Casino show at the Rotunda in Dublin and wishing I had seen it in situ and John Graham at Highlanes in Drogheda and the vegan sausage roll eaten on the much delayed train journey home; Matt Marble’s The American Museum of Paramusicology; walking on Sandymount Strand on a cold Sunday; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin; delving Stephen Ellcock’s ever changing image collection which makes the internet a better place; Sinéad Gleeson’s Hagstone; Zia Mohiuddin Dagar & Zia Fariduddin Dagar’s 1968 Bombay recordings on Black Sweat Records, Decoy and Joe McPhee and an equally beautiful set by Marilyn Crispell in Berlin;  the music of Meredith Monk; the Sacred Harp Singers, Berlin; B Wurtz’s You Know, This Is How He Is, published by Tutto, making its way from Australia to my bookshelf; The Wire magazine; The Sacred podcast and a weird dive into the world of Catholic podcasting, offering both highlights and several lowlights of my year, which relates to a bleak but also hopeful conversation with the artists Bergman & Salinas; St. George’s Bookshop, Berlin; looking at Nicolas Poussin at the National Gallery, Dublin; Frans Hals, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the Panta Rhei blog; walks through the little gardens near to where I live; cafés; my friend Jay Hōdo Roche giving a talk at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios; seeing the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis deal with the room as it is at the Lido, Berlin; apologies received and given; Alan Moore’s The Great When and Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s Bumper Book of Magic; Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere; Rotting Christ’s work, discovered through the lecture Black Metal By Fenriz; Marian Balfe’s playing cards and the replica of Austin Osman Spare’s Tarot Deck, published by Strange Attractor; Niamh O’Malley at Shtager&Shch, London; Robyn Denny, Vardaxoglou, London; getting to see some Carpaccio paintings at the Stastsgalerie, Stuttgart; John Rogers The Lost Byway films on Youtube and that medium has thrown up so much that I have enjoyed, including Stefan Milo’s pre-history channel and Simon Roper’s videos on linguistics, which are endlessly fascinating, Emma Thorne, Atomic Shrimp, the Majority Report and Novara Media; Aileen Murphy’s generosity in public conversation with me at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and the breadth of Indian classical music, which has been my constant companion throughout the year. 

Lowlights: 

Many people died this last year, and many in the art world, I was particularly sad at the passing away of Terri Thornton, artist, and former Curator of Education at the Modern in Fort Worth; obviously the ongoing wars in Palestine and Ukraine and the growing right-wing lunacy of much of the aforementioned Catholic podcasting, the delusion of many of those tuning into Joe Rogan and the obscene rise of Elon Musk.

Winter Solstice and the Turning of the Wheel with Jay Hōdo Roche

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin

Friday 20 December 2024, 11:30 am

Taking place in the street-facing Gallery at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, this talk takes advantage of the incoming morning light on the occasion of the Winter Solstice. Based on a longstanding friendship with exhibiting artist Fergus Feehily and themes and conversations they have shared over the years, the talk will reflect on the surrounding environment of Fergus’s solo exhibition Fortune House.

Fortune House is situated in deep winter, taking place on both sides of the solstice, continuing into brighter days. This changing context draws on ideas of illumination, making associations with places as far-reaching as the megalithic site of Newgrange and the neon streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo. These locations have personal significance to the artist, bridging time and memory through the exhibition.

The title, Fortune House, conjures a vision of a site where luck, prosperity, or a glimpse into the future might be found. Feehily states an increasing reticence to explain his work, allowing ideas around the art-making process to be puzzled out and questioned. He seeks an experience of looking without the need to pin down or impose a fixed meaning.

Jay Hōdo Roche was born in Dublin in 1968. He studied fine art painting in what is now IADT, graduating in 1990. He works professionally as an artist and runs a design and craft company based in county Wicklow. He was ordained as a Zen Priest in 2018 and is now a teacher at the Dublin Zen Centre in Temple Bar. He lives in Greystones, county Wicklow with his wife and children.

Tickets

Jay Hōdo Roche

Mirrors: Fergus Feehily in conversation with Aileen Murphy

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin

Saturday 14 December 2024, 12pm

The artists meet from time-to-time in Berlin, where they both now live, to drink coffee, talk about art, books, music, and much more. For this talk titled Mirrors, both painters will talk around the exhibition, where the work gets reflected, like light hitting a mirror across a room.

Aileen Murphy is an Irish artist based in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Wormhole, curated by Cristina Anglada, Galeria Pelaires, Palma (2023), food that I would feed my lover, Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2022), WET TALK, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2022), Flush, Amanda Wilkinson, London (2020) and PANTING, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (2019). Murphy studied at the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main and NCAD, Dublin. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Amanda Wilkinson, London, 2025.

Fortune House is on view in the Gallery 13, December 2024 - 23, February 2025.

Event Information: This talk takes place in the street-facing Gallery in Temple Bar. Seating will be provided. For further access information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

Tickets

Fortune House, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin

December 12, 2024 - February 23, 2025

Fergus Feehily’s exhibition is situated in deep winter, taking place on both sides of the solstice, continuing into brighter days. This changing context draws on ideas of illumination, making associations with places as far-reaching as the megalithic site of Newgrange and the neon streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo. These locations have personal significance to the artist, bridging time and memory through the exhibition. The title, Fortune House, conjures a vision of a site where luck, prosperity, or a glimpse into the future might be found. Feehily states an increasing reticence to explain his work, allowing ideas around the art-making process to be puzzled out and questioned. He seeks an experience of looking without the need to pin down or impose a fixed meaning.

Feehily’s paintings point to a constellation of cultural sources from the edges and margins. He accumulates a visual archive of reference points, which is sometimes incorporated into publications or exhibitions. The process of writing is another tool used to link disparate subjects. For this exhibition, a new artist’s book, The Horse and The Rider, brings together many reflections on thinking about and experiencing art, and alternative ways of seeing and understanding artistic values. Feehily’s self-reflective writing moves between disciplines, chronologies and geographies. This pocket-sized volume collapses worlds of understanding by linking Ursula K. Le Guin and Napalm Death’s expositions of truth, and the cosmic universality of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. Elsewhere, Sun Ra’s abandonment of knowing is related to the lost meaning of ancient Irish artefacts such as the Corleck Head carved stone. Through these compelling connections, between wandering thoughts and the real world, Feehily’s paintings are formed somewhere between the material and magical.

In their physicality, the paintings are made in both conventional and unconventional ways. They may have little or no paint, may not hang on a wall as expected, and they may have all manner of other materials, such as fabric or aluminium, glued or tacked to their surface or frame by the artist. Where there is a frame, it is not in the traditional sense of safeguarding or adding decoration but instead an integral part of the painting itself. While there are certain formal consistencies around structure or scale, the diversity in what constitutes one of Feehily’s paintings makes it hard to convey what makes a typical work by the artist. Some works in Fortune House can be considered rather painterly, while others are devoid of paint whatsoever.

Light, in various forms, is often at the heart of painting, reflecting surfaces back to the viewer through layers of pigment. While Feehily occasionally uses translucent or reflective surfaces, his interest lies in a metaphorical sense of luminosity, with areas of his research and subject matter responding to, or being transformed by, physical or spiritual enlightenment. The exhibition in all its plurality radiates into the cityscape, while allowing elements of the world to flow back into the gallery through a programme of talks and events. Several in-person presentations, and a walk across Dublin — circling back to the exhibition — are programmed to deconstruct the artifice and formality of traditional artists’ talks, and to further expand a range of references and readings of the exhibition’s ideas.

Feehily is a kind of flâneur, metaphorically and in his studio practice and daily life. Even his new book, described above, is put together as something that can accompany its reader on a walk. During the planning of this exhibition, Feehily proposed meeting in the exterior world rather than the studio, walking for the day and acknowledging the richness of encounter and chance. His trips to Dublin involved treading familiar streets, the ordinary and unusual, revisiting less-revered landmark sites such as Toner’s snug, Mary Dunne’s ecstatic dancing grounds on O’Connell Street, and the Italianate Sunlight Chambers on Essex Quay. A packed itinerary in London took in disparate sites such as the British Museum’s display of Dr. John Dee’s magic obsidian mirror, and the location of a closed-down heavy metal record shop in Soho, close to where William Blake learned printmaking.

In Shooter’s Hill, at the edge of South East London, Feehily drifted in the footsteps of novelist and comic-book writer, Steve Moore. The sunset pilgrimage hosted encounters with a Bronze Age burial mound overlooking the entirety of London, the house where Moore was born and died, and the setting of his timeline-shifting novel Somnium, in The Bull public house. The mystical atmosphere of Shooter’s Hill, steeped in history and mythology, spurred uncanny moments of revelation. It is these threshold spaces, where the everyday and magical are entwined, which resonate with Feehily’s art making. Viewers might find themselves circling his works in the gallery, checking each side, standing on tiptoes to peer from above, searching for discrete colours or textures that reward close looking. What cannot be easily grasped in writing or description is staged within the paintings themselves, individually or together. Feehily creates circumstances in which attunement to the possibility of something extraordinary unearths what one does not know they are looking for.

Dublin-born Fergus Feehily lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Lulu, Mexico City (2022); La Maison de Rendez-vous, Brussels (2020); Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne (2019); and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo (2018). His work has been shown at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art; X Museum, Beijing; Tokyo Opera City; June, Berlin; Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles; Capital, San Francisco; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Sydney Non-objective; and Two Rooms, Auckland. In 2023, a major new monograph on the artist was published by Zolo Press, Mexico City/Brussels.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Misako & Rosen, NADA, Miami

December 3 - December 7, 2024

MISAKO & ROSEN/The Green Gallery

December 3 - 7

Ice Palace Studios

The Green Gallery is thrilled to co-present a booth at NADA Miami fair this year with our dear friends from MISAKO & ROSEN gallery, Tokyo. Artists from both gallery programs as well as a shared friend will have work on view and be available for limited purchase. Please visit our booth for the latest new works by Erika Verzutti, Mari Eastman, Fergus Feehily, Michelle Grabner, Flora Klein, Ryan Peter, Takashi Yasumura, and COBRA.

The focused set of visual tendencies exhibited are representative of both our galleries’ styles. COBRA’s meta sense of humor is captured in his recent Story of eggs. A seductive flirtation with representational motifs is deftly delivered in the paintings of Eastman. Feehily’s idiosyncratic abstractions exert form, material and structure. Grabner’s indexical object-making is exceedingly refined through her paintings and sculptures. Klein interrogates the grid as a relentless structure of the present in her latest works. Peter’s surrealist tropes posit conditions of the mind today. The weight of Verzutti’s material is both real and fantastical. Yasumura’s elevated photography allows a reflection on the incidental itself.

Artists’ Fundraiser for Médicins Sans Frontières in aid of Palestine and Lebanon 2024

November 21 - December 18, 2024

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Seven leading Irish artists hold a raffle to raise funds to support those affected by the catastrophic war in Palestine and Lebanon.

Artworks have been donated by Clodagh Emoe, Brian Fay, Fergus Feehily, Jesse Jones, Atsushi Kaga, Aileen Murphy, and Kathy Tynan.

Tickets are available online for €10. We encourage those who can afford to buy or gift more than one ticket. All proceeds will go to Médicins Sans Frontières in aid of those suffering in Palestine and Lebanon.

The artists write:

‘World events can supersede us so quickly. The terrible crises that are happening now demand us to stop and reflect on what we can do, to support the connections we have in common, to remind ourselves of our basic humanity, and to reflect on the vital role of empathy. Art can help us with this process and as artists we stand for peace, solidarity and equality.’

The works will be on view in the Atrium of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The raffle continues online until midnight Wednesday 18 December 2024. The draw will take place 19 December and prizes will be allocated alphabetically as names are drawn.

Works will be available for collection on 20 + 21 December. Shipping can be arranged with TBG+S at the winners expense. Please note the gallery closes 22 December 2024 for the Christmas period.

Tickets

The Drawing Center, NYC, Benefit Auction 2024

September 26 -30, 2024

This year's benefit auction brings together 35 artists, curators, and art lovers from The Drawing Center's community to examine why we are drawn to some artworks over others. Each guest curator will present a selection of five or more works on paper by artists they admire.

Works will be on view from Thursday, September 26 through Monday, September 30, and will be available for purchase through a silent auction benefiting The Drawing Center and participating artists.

Curators: Hoor Al Qasimi, Hilton Als, Rebecca Brickman, Lauren Cornell, Matthew Deleget, Rebecca DiGiovanna, Jarrett Earnest, Marty Eisenberg, Jack Eisenberg, Peter Eleey, Gary Garrels, Claire Gilman, Alexander Gorlizki, Matthew Higgs, Laura Hoptman, Anthony Huberman, Priscila Hudgins, KAWS, Randy Kennedy, Christopher Y. Lew, Bob Nickas, Linda Norden, Adam Pendleton, Olivia Shao, Jack Shear, Tiffany Shi, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Barbara Toll, Julia Trotta, Gee Wesley, Linda Yablonsky, John Yau, Lynn Zelevansky

The Drawing Center

Quietly Dispelling the Dark

Colm Tóibín selects from the Arts Council Collection

September 20, 2024 - January 19, 2025

VISUAL is pleased to present Quietly Dispelling the Dark, a selection of work drawn from the Arts Council Collection. The works in this exhibition have been selected by writer Colm Tóibín, in his role as Laureate for Irish Fiction. A text by Tóibín accompanies this exhibition and will be available on the VISUAL website and in the gallery, along with a map which will allow the viewer to identify particular works.

Artists included in the exhibition are:

Michael Coleman, Maud Cotter, Mary Farl Powers, Fergus Feehily, Marie Foley, Gerda Fromel, Sarah Iremonger, Brenda Kelliher, Cecil King, Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde, TJ Maher, Mary McIntyre, Dennis McNulty, Julie Merriman, Anthony O'Carroll, Paul O'Keeffe, Michael Warren

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including The Master, Brooklyn, The Magician and Long Island, and two collections of short stories and many works of non-fiction. He has been three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2021 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Tóibín was appointed the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024. The Laureate for Irish Fiction is an initiative of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Tóibín will deliver the Laureate for Irish Fiction Annual Lecture 2024 in VISUAL on Sunday 3 November.

VISUAL

Colm Tóibín

Arts Council of Ireland

A. W. book with 41/42, Cornwall, Sold Out

A.W.

Fergus Feehily has in recent years shown a certain reticence to in any sense explain his work and A.W., his new publication for 41/42, is no different. The publication was made over just a couple of weeks in early 2023, and includes paper works made by Feehily in the last couple of years, images from the artist’s collection, and makes reference to the artist Alfred Wallis, who lived in St Ives, Cornwall.

Fergus Feehily is an artist living in Berlin, Germany.

28 pages

14 x 20 cm b/w booklet

29.7 x 42 cm 2-sided colour sheet

First Edition of 30

2023

41/42

Zolo Press, Printed Matter

Now available at Printed Matter. NYC, Zolo Press Mexico City/Brussels monograph Fergus Feehily.

Oil, carpet tacks, acrylic, gesso, gouache, twigs, the occasional spray paint, pencil, dabs of watercolour, found photographs, found frames, bandages, a paper bag or two, screws, aluminium foil, sweet wrappers, scrap wood. The marginal meets in the paintings of Fergus Feehily (1968, Dublin, Ireland), paintings that themselves stand at the periphery of contemporary painterly conventions - Whose "subtle activity," as Martin Herbert observes, "Is On Its Way Somewhere Else, Drifting Out Of View." This book is the most comprehensive monograph on the artist to date. It brings into view more than one-hundred works made over more than 15 years alongside clippings, notes, and research material from the artist's archive as well as exhibitions staged from Aachen to Mexico City to Tokyo. Essays by Martin Herbert, curator Chris Sharp, and artist Sarah Braman celebrate Feehily's reminder of, as writes the latter, "the joy of just looking".

Printed Matter

Zolo Press