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.