Kanazawa Ema

Fergus Feehily

2025

UV print on wood, acrylic on plywood, string

15.5 x 10 x 0.7 cm

Edition of 25 copies, all unique, numbered and signed by the artist, plus 5 artist’s proofs and 3 publishers’ proofs

Price

€280.00

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The edition

An ema is a small wooden votive tablet on which wishes or prayers are written before being hung in a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple. These tablets function as vehicles of communication with the kami (divinities) or with protective spirits. For his edition, Fergus Feehily makes use of this format and material, a gesture that is consistent with his sustained investigation into painting’s ability to extend beyond the conventional supports of canvas and paper, to inhabit and regenerate itself through alternative material grounds.

In this work, a mechanically printed black-and-white background, reminiscent of wallpaper, serves as the setting for a small vignette marked by vividly colored, hand-painted marks. From this interplay arises a singular play of scale: the hypnotic surface appears at moments to unfold into a third dimension, drawing on the formal resemblance between the ema and the structure of a house. The violet touches on wood oscillate between functioning as a painting-within-the-painting and as an aperture—recalling the long-standing analogy of painting as a window onto another space. In this way, the work reconnects with the original function of the ema: making of its reduced surface a site of reception for imaginary spaces and intangible presences.

The artist

Fergus Feehily was born in 1968 in Dublin. He lives in Berlin.

Since the late 1990s, Feehily has developed a practice rooted in painting, using fragile, everyday materials such as paper, cardboard, fabric, thin wood, and found objects. He creates works that are intimate yet elusive, inviting close attention to texture, structure, and detail. Often modest in scale, they nevertheless engage with all the aspects of the act of painting, its visible and material properties as well as its hidden possibilities, its history and its becoming.

Emerging from a certain legacy of post-minimalism, Feehily’s approach manifests also a sensitivity to impermanence, indirectness, and margin, possibly inherited from his years spent in Japan. The experience of displacement—cultural, visual, and temporal—appears to play a crucial role here. At the same time as they invite us to surrender to the pure present of contemplation, his paintings always open pathways—through a subtle play of concealment and revelation—onto a whole universe of echoes and reminiscences.

Fergus Feehily’s work has been shown at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), X Museum (Beijing), Tokyo Opera City (Tokyo), MISAKO & ROSEN (Tokyo), June (Berlin), Lulu (Mexico City), Chris Sharp Gallery (Los Angeles), Capital (San Francisco), La Maison de Rendez-vous (Brussels), Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin) and Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Jerwood Sapce (London), Sydney Non-objective (Sydney), and Two Rooms (Auckland), among others.

Fergus Feehily is represented by MISAKO & ROSEN (Tokyo).

The exhibition