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Felim Egan (b.1952) FORELAND

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Felim Egan (b.1952) FORELAND

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Auction Date:2005 Apr 26 @ 18:00 (UTC+00:00 : GMT)
Location:Dublin, Ireland
Felim Egan (b.1952) FORELAND<BR>signed, inscribed and dated [1998] on reverse<BR>oil and acrylic on canvas<BR>210 by 210cm., 82.5 by 82.5in.<BR><BR>Exhibited:<BR>‘Felim Egan’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 27 March - 16 May 1998, catalogue no. 5 (illustrated page 21 of catalogue to the exhibition)<BR><BR>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 Séamus 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. <BR><BR> <BR><BR>Dr Yvonne Scott,<BR>Director of the Irish Art Research Centre,<BR>Trinity College Dublin<BR>