Hank Feeley returns to First Street Gallery presenting an exhibition
of new paintings entitled Sum greater than Parts. "If Hank Feeley were not so strikingly original, I would say that he
stands at the intersection of Magritte and Marvel Comics, but as it
is, he has his own way of disorienting the viewer so we can see
again, now with our perception refreshed." - Billy Collins. Hank Feeley paints with an eye to the heroic eternal quality of the
common, everyday signs and symbols which add up to a measure of our
culture and the larger truths about our society. The First Street Gallery promotes their artists with a Gallery Portfolio at absolutearts.com.
Feeley's themes, like his canvases, are big; a reflection on and a
reaction to the enigmatic world we live in. Like our intellect that
sorts through the cacophony to arrive at coherent interpretation, his
paintings assemble a miscellany of disjunctive visual information
into a congruent, fantastic entity.
His work re-contextualizes and layers the familiar images, signs, and
symbols of contemporary culture, causing the viewer to rethink and
reconsider their meaning and relevance and that of the whole. The
whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.
The work is multivalent and paradoxical. The painting styles run the
gamut from abstraction to zines. The engaged viewer will also find
subtle reference to literary and art history. This is a mysterious
alchemy combining logic with wackiness, precision with ambiguity, the
profound with the sophomoric. The work combines aesthetic democracy
(pluralism) with artistic mastery and Feeley brings it all off with a
provocative, emotionally grabbing virtuosity.
A lifetime artist, Hank Feeley is also a former international
Chairman/CEO and retired Vice Chairman of Leo Burnett Company,
Chicago. Paradoxically, he is a graduate of both Harvard Business
School and of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Feeley is
represented in Chicago by the Packer Schopf Gallery with his most
recent show in 2006. He has been reviewed by Alan Artner of the
Chicago Tribune as well as the Chicago Journal, the Chicago Reader,
and New York Newsday among others. In 2005, Hank Feeley received the
Holbein Prize given by the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Feeley's work
is in corporate and private collections in the United States and
abroad. In New York City he shows with the First Street Gallery.
View more of the exhibition at absoltuearts.com http://galleries.absolutearts.com/firststreetgallery/.
IMAGE
Henry Feeley
Title: "Dactylic Hexameter" , 2006
Size: 54 x 132 inches (width x height)
Medium: Oil Painting
Related Links: