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Canada Gallery opens a show which of Gerald Ferguson’s work which feel incredibly fresh, given its age. Recently deceased, Ferguson came of age at a time when abstraction met process met conceptualism. He began teaching at NSCAD in Halifax and soon developed what Dalhousie Art Gallery curator Susan Gibson Garvey referred to as “literal, task-oriented paintings. This exhibition of Ferguson’s paintings is curated by Luke Murphy. It includes eleven major works and is accompanied by a catalog with essays and pieces by Lawrence Weiner, Donald Kuspit and Peggy Gale. |
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“Ropes, chains, clothesline, ash cans, drain covers, black enamel house paint rubbed across raw canvas”
For Immediate Release: Gerald Ferguson. Work. at Canada Gallery
Canada Gallery opens a show which of Gerald Ferguson’s work which feel incredibly fresh, given its age. Recently deceased, Ferguson came of age at a time when abstraction met process met conceptualism. He began teaching at NSCAD in Halifax and soon developed what Dalhousie Art Gallery curator Susan Gibson Garvey referred to as “literal, task-oriented paintings.”
This exhibition of Ferguson’s paintings is curated by Luke Murphy. It includes eleven major works and is accompanied by a catalog with essays and pieces by Lawrence Weiner, Donald Kuspit and Peggy Gale.
Ropes, chains, clothesline, ash cans, drain covers, black enamel house paint rubbed across raw canvas, repeated, rearranged and repeated again — the work of Gerald Ferguson appears in New York for the first time in forty years. This array of eleven paintings include works from his 1968 typographical “period” paintings and a key group of his later frottages.
Ferguson was a first generation conceptual artist whose early conversations informed his approach to painting throughout his career. From his ‘task oriented’ paintings to his later rigorous methodology, painting was, in his words, one of the only things he really understood. His work, he said “let beauty in through the back door.”
“Gerald Ferguson. Work.” is a glimpse of a career driven by an autotelic logic. It begins with his early stenciled grids and ends with his late works, created by passing black-enamel laden rollers over abject objects under raw canvas and forming expansive landscapes of black indexical marks or dense monumental architectonic compositions.
Ferguson’s work can be characterized as sets of sometimes beautiful, sometimes difficult tensions between the manifest logic and the absurd simplicity of the process, between roughshod production and the sensitivity of the chosen compositions, between blackness and the promise of light.
Gerald Ferguson. Work. Stencil Through Frottage From 1968 is on view from Jan 7 – Feb 12, 2012. Opening Reception: January 7th, 6-8 PM.
