Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. Text by Josh Pazda. Conversation with Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka.
American artist Tony Feher (1956–2016) was best known for his sculptures and site-determined installations made of ubiquitous, everyday objects such as plastic bottles, glass jars, marbles, twine, cardboard boxes and other mass-produced items. It is less well known was that he was also a prolific draftsman who drew incessantly throughout his career. At the time of his death in 2016, Feher had assembled an archive of nearly 1,000 drawings—on napkins, discarded correspondence, restaurant menus, lined paper—which are now in the collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In hasty arrays of image and text, these drawings reflect the same singular wit and aesthetic sensitivity that underpinned all his work. This monograph presents for the first time a selection of Feher's drawings: full of jokes, poems, schematic illustrations and the repeated images (such as a jug of water hung on cord) that would later populate his sculptural installations.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co./Blaffer Art Museum. Text by Claudia Schmuckli, Russell Ferguson.
Bottles aligned on shelves or suspended in the air, jars of marbles and dye-filled tubes: form, substance and structure emerge from deceptively humble means in the sculpture of Tony Feher. His work uses gravity, light and repetition to isolate and animate everyday objects, creating a sculptural territory that Feher can rightfully claim as entirely his own. Published in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Blaffer Art Museum, this is the first publication to explore work from throughout the artist’s significant and influential career. This comprehensive book reproduces his many sculptures, site-specific installations and two-dimensional works and includes major new texts on Feher’s practice from Blaffer Director Claudia Schmuckli and curator and writer Russell Ferguson. Superbly realized by renowned New York design studio Matsumoto Incorporated, this publication is the definitive book on the work of a vanguard American artist.
Tony Feher