Lot 3465 - A201 PostWar & Contemporary - Thursday, 30. June 2022, 05.00 PM
MARC-ANTOINE FEHR
(Zurich 1953–lives and works in Pressy)
Pressy, nuit. 2002.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated lower right: Marc-Antoine Fehr 02, as well as signed and dated again on the reverse: Marc-Antoine Fehr novembre 2002.
190 × 250 cm.
Provenance:
- Galerie Krugier & Cie, Geneva (verso with the label).
- Purchased form the above, since then private collection Switzerland.
Marc-Antoine Fehr was born and raised in Zurich in 1953. Today the artist lives and works between Zurich and Pressy, in Burgundy. He comes from a family of artists from Lausanne and continues the family tradition as a painter. He is the son of the painter Marie-Hélène Clément and grandson of the painter Charles Clément. Surrounded by art, the young Fehr taught himself the artistic techniques from an early age. From the very beginning, his preoccupation with figurative motifs was a matter of course for him, as Cézanne was already the measure of all things for his mother and grandfather. Fehr, always curious, was also inspired by the masters Piero della Francesa, Bruegel, Bosch and Rembrandt, and the literature of Flaubert, Kafka, Beckett, and Dante also had a significant influence on him.
Fehr's works are influenced by everyday life. Thematically, he cultivates the classic genres of still lifes, portraits, certain angles of interiors and landscapes. He makes his surroundings visible and gives simple, concrete situations a presence. For Fehr, the meaningful can scarcely be separated from the everyday and the banal, for the representational in all its materiality has too much meaning for that. His classic figurative themes and formulations may indeed hark back to the early 19th century, to the Romantic period, and thus set him apart from the contemporary themes of his time, but his approach is nevertheless very contemporary. He favours monumental formats. The pictorial motifs he chooses are not subject to any hierarchy. On the contrary, Fehr prefers to disrupt hierarchies by, for example, reversing the proportions and depicting the large as small and the small as large.
After graduating from high school, Marc-Antoine Fehr moved from Zurich to Burgundy, to his parents' holiday home. The name of the secluded little village where the villa is located is reflected in the title of our present painting - Pressy. The country house is surrounded by a park. The rural tranquillity of the place and the rooms of the villa are Fehr's source of inspiration. From the nineties onwards, he created several paintings entitled 'Paysage à Pressy'. The spaces immediately around the house, such as the terrace, the south side, the garden, the pond, or the view of the hilly landscape, are his private microcosm, which he shares with the outside world through his works.
The calm and peaceful landscape with its different lighting conditions of day and night is an inexhaustible source of motifs for the artist. In 2002 he painted the present landscape, which seems to dissolve in the evening twilight. The dark horizon of this hilly landscape merges with the charged and heavy clouds, which give the appearance of being just before or after the November thunderstorm. The black clouds just barely allow the last faded yellow rays of the sun and the light blue twilight to shine through. The viewer's eyes scan the dark landscape in search of shadows and shapes. We can clearly recognise certain artistic inspirations: the play of light in Romanticism or the strong contrasts of the late Renaissance.
CHF 10 000 / 16 000 | (€ 10 310 / 16 490)
Sold for CHF 10 625 (including buyer’s premium)
All information is subject to change.