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
