Jeff Feld: Drawings

Feuilleton is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the New York-based artist Jeff Feld.

Jeff Feld is a sculptor whose work is marked by an interest in materials, formal invention and a dry, absurdist sense of humor. For his exhibition at Feuilleton, Feld presents a selection of abstract works on paper made primarily throughout 2020. These small-scale works are crafted out of industrial paper and feature collages elements, enamel spray paint and ink. They posses a marginal event-like quality, as if they were byproducts of occurrences that happened in the eventfulness of his studio. This marginal character can not only literally be descried in the smears and smudges of paint that variously adorn the paper, but also symbolically in the leitmotif of the central void or lacuna which tends to pictorially punctuate all of the work. At times it might be an amorphous mass cut out of a piece of paper which looks like a crossword puzzle which is itself partially obscured by a thick web, at others, something so simple as an irregularly shaped sheet of pink paper with a perfect circle punched out of it. Whatever is depicted, negative space always seems to be demarcated by an overlapping collage element. That said, the absences these works delineate do not seem to indicate a lack, or more specifically, an insufficiency, so much as they do a fullness, or even a wholeness. One is reminded of Georges Bataille’s negative affirmation: Man is that which he lacks.

Jeff Feld’s artworks have been featured in national and international exhibitions at such venues as The Drawing Center, Artists Space, White Columns Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum and The Queens Museum in New York, and Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsinborg, Sweden. His work resides in numerous private collections as well as in The New School University Collection, and in SYZYGY–The JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection. A former child protective services social worker, Feld received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2002. He lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens.