Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
Date: June 13 – July 19, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto
COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Geoff McFetridge. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, his first in Toronto since 2012.
In the paintings on show, Geoff McFetridge waxes poetic on the human condition. Figures are arranged against flat tonal surfaces, often forming simple shapes in their solidarity. They lean on one another or melt, become one; they leap through space using heads as stepping-stones. The way McFetridge has choreographed bodies makes apt metaphor for social mechanism, whereby the final form (of a new image or world) is achieved through collective action and support. In paintings otherwise, the motif of a string is present, looping through geometric forms and bodily fragments, an ode to the interconnectedness of things. In a moment, coloured line embodies thought: graspable between the narrow in-betweens of fingers, or differently transferrable among communing individuals. For this, McFetridge continues his ongoing conceptual investigation of painting at the nexus of drawing and design.
Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Calgary, Canada) received his Bachelor of Art from The AlbertaCollege of Art and Design, Calgary, Canada, and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA. He has exhibited internationally at The Art Gallery of Vancouver, Vancouver; Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; Joshua Liner Gallery, Half Gallery, The Hole, Cooper Hewitt, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Pasadena Museum of Art, Pasadena; County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, USA; Parco Gallery X, PlayMountain, AD21, Tokyo, Japan; Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, Australia; Ivory & Black, London, United Kingdom; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Mu, Eindhoven, Netherlands; The Spitroom, Berlin, Germany; Volta, Basel, Switzerland. He is the winner of the 2016 Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award. In 2019, he was awarded The Medal of AIGA. McFetridge currently lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
