deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
May 24 – September 15, 2013
DeCordova is pleased to present the 25-year survey dedicated to American sculptor Tony Feher. This exhibition will be the first comprehensive, in-depth consideration of Feher’s career. It seeks to reveal the richness, complexity, and impact of his investigations through a careful selection of key works that revolve around a very personal, formal, material, and spatial vocabulary developed and refined over the years.
Feher’s materials range from bottles filled with colored water, to marbles and pennies, Styrofoam blocks and beverage crates, plastic bags and paper cups, to all kinds of packing materials. Although Feher’s materials are quotidian and easily acquired, they are very specific, sought after, and chosen for their distinct and inimitable formal qualities. He stacks, dangles, unfolds, and aligns his materials to form sculptures of fluid lines, thoughtful rhythms and bursts of color and light that enable the viewer to observe and appreciate the beauty and poetry in the ordinary, everyday objects that surround them. The commonality of his materials and the apparent ease with which his works occupy their environment belie the rigorous nature of a practice driven by an incessant quest for moments of clarity, beauty, quietude.
Having come of age in an intellectual climate dominated by an overwhelming sense of endangerment due to the epidemic spread of AIDS, Feher, like so many artists of his generation, opted for humanism. His proud embrace of fragility, transience, and emotion, along with his preference for non-precious materials and found objects, has been highly influential for a younger generation of artists who have similarly become archivists of their own lives.
Tour Dates
May 11 – September 2, 2012
Des Moines Art Center
October 13, 2012 – March 17, 2013
Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston
May 26 – September 16, 2013
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
October 6, 2013 – February 16, 2014
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
April 12 – August 17, 2014
Akron Art Museum
