Brian Fekete

Brian Fekete's No. 105 is a small, unframed 10 x 8 inch monochromatic watercolor pencil drawing on vintage paper.  Drawn in modulated indigo blue watercolor pencil over a page of a 1943 trigonometry resource printed with columns of numerical results, the deliberately distorted figure of of a head in profile stretches vertically down the page.  An elegant, rolled hairstyle pulls back from the face, and while the line that defines the forehead, nose, chin and neck is clear, the artist has used the careful application of water to create delicate veils of modulated blues around the hair.  Using historic source imagery, Fekete subverts a kind of intrinsic nostalgia, suggesting perhaps, the subjective and problematic quality of recorded history.  Part of his "Small Text" series, dynamic dialogues are created when a few are hung together.

Fekete states, "The motivations and methodologies typical of much of my work are concerned with creating new formal as well as metaphorical contexts for found and appropriated imagery.  Employing a wide range of wet, dry, and collaged media, the sources of this imagery are as far flung as zoology and theology, body parts and auto parts.  It has been slowly and methodically collected over many years.  It is often manipulated, recombined and distorted utilizing relatively low tech photomechanical (xerographic) processes which produce random results not easily dictated or controlled by the artist.  Limited control is a desired consequence which forces the artist to make decisions within the parameters of the individual outcomes of process.  These resulting distortions and re-combinations pose many possibilities for abstraction and visual readings not intended for the original image.  They also place the images in entirely new and sometimes unsettling contexts, ripe for personal commentary, thus, reinterpretation on various levels (i.e. political, religious and psychological).  In some depictions, science, nature and technology may be observed collaborating in unison.  One by one images are selected and grouped, often incongruously, then varying shifts in scale are introduced with a projector, building a uniquely distinct personal mythology and visual vocabulary.  My objective is to present refreshing new settings for psychological tableaux and phenomenological scenarios through formal language by injecting otherwise neutral imagery with layers of new meaning."

Now settled and working in Kingston, NY, Brian Fekete reached the Hudson Valley by way of Brooklyn and Detroit, where he was born in 1955. There, he received his BFA and MFA degrees, before moving to Brooklyn in 1997. Fekete has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Wayne State University, and grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts. His work can be seen in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as numerous public and private collections, both in the US and abroad.