NEW YORK, NY.- Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is presenting a two-person exhibition of works by Louis Fratino and Tony Feher, on view September 9 through October 16. Featuring a series of new etchings and works on paper by Fratino, and mixed-media sculptures by Feher, their work opens an intergenerational dialogue on the queer subjectivity and inherent beauty revealed in the objects, spaces, and gestures of everyday life.
Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Tony Feher’s unique body of work recast the utilitarian and familiar into sculptures both elegant and ambiguous in their perceived simplicity. His materials often included found items and common detritus, including bottles, containers, and glasses; empty vessels that served their immediate function, and are subsequently discarded. In careful arrangements, Feher foregrounds the aesthetic properties of these objects—color, shape, mass—against their physical disposability. The results are installations both vulnerable and poetic in their presentation, contemplating the endurance of form against the transience of meaning.
Louis Fratino’s new series of editions see the artist exploring a new method of image-making within his rich oeuvre of painting, drawing, and sculpture. In both his editions and works on paper, Fratino adapts the visual languages of European and American Modernism to represent moments both singular and prosaic. A flock of birds soaring above the countryside, or a vase of flowers and seashells set against ocean waves, evoke the same intimacy as interior scenes of two men making love atop the bedsheets, or the artist’s own self-portrait of quiet reflection, seated at a table and holding a piece of floss close to his face. Existing in the space between quotidian invention and personal memory, Fratino’s etchings imagine moments in life as simple as they are sublime.
Tony Feher (1956-2016) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas, and resided 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.
Born in 1993, in Annapolis, MD, Louis Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
