Tony Feher, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Tony Feher 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York 
Through January 18, 2014 

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Encore, a solo exhibition of work by TONY FEHER. The show marks twenty years since the gallery, then called Wooster Gardens, first presented Tony Feher’s work in his premier solo exhibition in New York.

Over a career that spans more than twenty-five years, Tony Feher has defined a unique place in contemporary art by creating elegant and poetic sculptures and installations using familiar, everyday objects. Imposing order on these materials is an artistic gesture—one of collecting, stacking, arranging—that mirrors basic human impulses and long-standing art historical traditions. Feher’s post-minimalist, serial constructions are rooted in Robert Irwin’s reductive vocabulary, Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” and Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, which elevated objects of mass production to the status of art objects.

The artworks’ aesthetic character is dictated by the essential form, color, texture and weight of the original material as evident in Tony Feher’s shelves of bottles partly filled with dyed water. When glowing light filters through the colored water, the sculpture adopts the significance of stained glass despite its modest material quality.  Pairing an original sense of humor and wit with a controlled minimalist aesthetic, Feher accentuates and exploits these material characteristics to alter our understanding and appreciation of these simple objects and thus also altering our world view.

TONY FEHER was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1956, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas, and currently resides 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, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

An in-depth retrospective organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the university of Houston, premiered at the Des Moines Art Center in 2012, and traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. The exhibition is currently on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through February 16, 2014, before traveling to the Akron Art Museum from April 16 through August 17. A fully illustrated monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. was published to accompany the survey.

Upcoming exhibition: Josephine Halvorson, January 23 - March 1, 2014

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 
530 W 22nd Street - New York, NY 10011
www.sikkemajenkinsco.com