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Felim Egan (b.1952) FORELAND signed, inscribed and dated [1998] on reverse oil and acrylic on can...

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Felim Egan (b.1952) FORELAND signed, inscribed and dated [1998] on reverse oil and acrylic on can...
Felim Egan (b.1952)
FORELAND
signed, inscribed and dated [1998] on reverse
oil and acrylic on canvas
210 by 210cm., 82.5 by 82.5in.
Exhibited:
‘Felim Egan’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 27 March - 16 May 1998, catalogue no.
5 (illustrated p.21 of catalogue to the exhibition)
Felim Egan is known primarily as an abstract painter and sculptor. However,
Foreland is one of a series of works from the late 1990s which balance on the
boundary between abstraction and landscape. This painting was shown at the
artist’s one-man exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1999). It
comprises small, flat geometric shapes in bright colours – unlike any objects in
the visible world – floating on a textured ground. This ground, with its
resonances of cloudy sky or water, or of damp sand marked by retreating tides,
infers the physicality of the natural environment. The equilibrium of the forms
in Egan’s work relate to his interest in music, but speak also of isolation in
vast space, described by Seamus Heaney in the catalogue to the exhibition as
"the solitude of a self standing wide open". The suggestion of landscape is
supported by the titles of the works, most of which carry a reference to place –
in this case Bloody Foreland in Donegal.
The square format of this large painting is a Modernist device, originally
associated with Minimalist abstraction which was first introduced to Ireland in
the 1960s. However, Egan breaks with the pure, restrained ethic of Minimalism,
troubling the surface of the canvas and introducing an emotive dimension. He
infringes, also, the self-containment of the painting with unfinished forms at
the margin, suggesting their continuity beyond the picture plane. The artist’s
brinksmanship between the abstract and the tangible, strict geometric order and
unruly turbulence, rationality and passion, is aptly reflected in the title of
the work. A foreland is a region between land and sea that is subject both the
predictable order of tides, as well as the more random nature of weather; it is
the junction of the solidity of land, and the fluidity of water.
Dr Yvonne Scott
Dublin, March 2004
€12,000-€15,000 (£8,000-£10,100 sterling approx.)