Geoff McFetridge

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Us As A Landscape, Recent Figures for the Film My Blue Suit, a solo exhibition of the work of artist Geoff McFetridge. This will be the debut exhibition at our new Cooper Cole West space at 1136 Dupont Street.

McFetridge’s paintings, prints, and drawings are visual maps of the artist’s ethos. Invested in the legibility of an image, McFetridge is interested in how images exist in-between or outside of language, and in turn how this encourages more open-minded approaches to cognition. His works connect poetry and form, and slip between interpretations to connote the interconnectedness of people in public spaces.

This new series began with McFetridge’s observations of people sitting and reclining in public spaces over the past year. According to the artist, the figures are both inspired by the landscape and landscapes unto themselves: the folds and shadows of their clothes intentionally mimic the folds of hills. Using his signature visual language of rounded shapes and slick lines, the artist depicts various people suspended in blank, ambiguous spaces. These flat, monochrome backgrounds are typical of McFetridge’s work but read differently after months of isolation. While on the one hand they create a sense of introspection, on the other they speak to the simultaneity of our individual experiences, and their subsequent collectivity. In doing so, McFetridge points to the horizontality of people, and imagines a hopeful future.

According to the artist, his practice is a vocabulary of poetic thinking expressed in images. Much of McFetridge’s painterly language comes from quick, observational gouache paintings made in his sketchbooks. From the first pencil study to the final painting, McFetridge’s process is one of refining and simplifying. He begins by drawing shapes and bodies, and then thinks about how they can be used to create a dialogue with each other. To look at his studies and paintings is to witness a process of adjusting and fitting forms with one another visually and conceptually. McFetridge sees this as an almost mechanical process, whereby the components of his images are functional pieces that come together into something that is highly legible to a broad audience, though without a specific narrative.

Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) McFetridge received his BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. McFetridge was part of the infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition which debuted in downtown New York in 1991 and went on to tour the world. He has continued to exhibit in international galleries including Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (2020); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); Half Gallery, New York (2018); V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2016); PlayMountain, Tokyo (2013); and Heath Gallery, Los Angeles (2011). McFetridge has also been included in museum exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Museum, and The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA Los Angeles. McFetridge currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.