Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, collage
Website: matthewmarks.com/artists/vincent-fecteau
Vincent Fecteau was born in 1969 in Islip, New York, and has lived and worked in San Francisco his entire career as an artist. He received a BA in Painting from Wesleyan University in 1992, then quickly walked away from two-dimensional media, drawn to the tactility of sculpture and the irreducible three-dimensionality of objects that cannot be fully perceived from any single vantage point. He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, and Galerie Buchholz in Cologne and Berlin. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA and SFMOMA.
His major institutional solo exhibitions have been at the Art Institute of Chicago (2008), the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2004), Inverleith House in Edinburgh (2010), the Kunsthalle Basel (2015), the Vienna Secession (2016), the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco (2019), and the Fridericianum in Kassel (2022). His work was included in the 2002 and 2012 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Carnegie International. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship — the “genius grant” — in 2016. He produces no more than eight works every eighteen months, and serves as a volunteer art teacher at a long-term care facility in San Francisco.
Fecteau makes small-to-medium-scale abstract sculptures and collages by hand, working slowly and intuitively — taking a year or longer to complete each piece. His sculptures are built up in layers of papier-mâché, painted in unnerving yet alluring combinations of rich matte color, and displayed on the wall or at varied heights to offer multiple views. His process is iterative and non-conceptual: he begins with a form, changes it repeatedly, steering it away from resembling any single thing too closely, so that it never quite settles into one way of being read. The MacArthur Foundation described his works as forms that “hover on the verge of instability,” their undulations emphasizing the handmade over the machine-produced, their twists and swerves conveying subtle visual humor as they flirt with notions of decoration. His collages combine architecture magazine clippings with his own photographs and materials such as cardboard, found wood, and rope to create shallow reliefs charged with spatial ambiguity. Across thirty years he has maintained a remarkable consistency of intent and material while resisting the conventions of professional art life.
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