Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Vincent Fecteau, his first at the gallery. The exhibition will consist of eight new painted papier-mâché sculptures.

For these works, Fecteau began by applying papier-mâché to a semi-inflated beach ball, which he then manipulated and removed from the cavity of each work. The sculptures have similar looking curves because of their shared beginnings however each piece has been worked into an entirely new form. The sculptures sit on pedestals and are made without preparatory drawings; they are his largest works to date. Painted in unusual colors, sometimes offset against fields of black or white, the works are beautiful, though never in a conventional way. The eight sculptures in this series were completed in 2008 and first shown in a one-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

With their incongruous forms and unnerving color schemes, Fecteau’s meticulous handmade sculptures belie the many formal decisions made by the artist in completing each work. Working slowly, he produces a small number of sculptures every few years. He has said of his working process, “I like to work on a group of pieces all at the same time, spending long periods just staring at things and trying to activate or access a feeling that somehow relates to what I’m trying to make. …When I’m open to things but not fixed on an objective is when I’m most likely to discover a connection that helps a piece feel more resolved.”

Vincent Fecteau (b. 1969) lives in San Francisco. His work appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the UC Berkeley Museum of Art. Fecteau recently organized an exhibition of twenty-three works from the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that had rarely, if ever, been on public display. The exhibition remains on view through November 8th of this year.