Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Paul Feeley: The shape of things, opening September 4, 2025, at 545 West 20th Street. The exhibition is the fourth presentation of Feeley’s work at the gallery, and the first to focus on Feeley’s groundbreaking body of sculptural work. Featuring a key group of Feeley’s canvases and painted-wood constructions, the show will also present a museum-quality display of rarely seen preparatory materials, including a selection of maquettes, sketches, and drawings publicly on view for the first time. A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Sarah K. Rich, will accompany the show.

A central figure in the Color Field movement, Feeley initially gained prominence as a painter, turning to sculpture only in the final years of his life. Nevertheless, a close examination of Feeley’s output suggests that sculptural concerns were central to the artist’s imagination from the beginning. Starting with his earliest canvases, Feeley’s work was informed by an almost classical exploration of how three-dimensional objects can be described via two-dimensional planes, and of how a flat surface can be a vehicle for conveying mass, gravity, and volume. His inquiry into these relationships—motivated by a lifelong fascination with Greek, Moorish, and Cycladic art—is never didactic, but creative, subtle, and intuitive. In Feeley’s hands, a sculpture or a painting is often shown to live in a space between one thing or the other, hinting at a multitude of shapes, forms, and possibilities.

As Sarah K. Rich writes of Feeley’s sculpture El rescha (1965): “It stands in the room with the beholder, but with its flat planes and austere symmetry it also occupies hieratic space. With colors that transition from an interior red core to a boundary of white and yellow, its boundaries ripple with energy. El Rescha is a radiant presence.”