Gerald Ferguson at COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Gerald Ferguson.

This posthumous exhibition features a selection of artwork created in the early to mid-1990s, highlighting Ferguson’s deeply conceptual and labour-intensive practice.

Using unconventional materials including house paint, construction materials, and organic objects Ferguson developed systems and self-imposed procedures that emphasized repetition, duration, and process over traditional notions of composition or expression.

His paintings often recorded the physical act of their own making, transforming routine gestures into rigorous conceptual structures.

At once humorous and methodical, Ferguson’s work challenged conventions of authorship and artistic value while remaining grounded in the material realities of painting. The works in this exhibition reflect a mature period in the artist’s career, where conceptual clarity and physical endurance became inseparable. Through accumulation, seriality, and acts of measured labour, Ferguson created paintings that continue to resonate for their intellectual precision, formal restraint, and subtle wit.

Gerald Ferguson (b. 1937, Ohio, USA – d. 2009, Halifax, NS, Canada) was a widely acclaimed conceptual artist, painter, writer, curator, collector, and influential professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for almost four decades. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, as well as in the U.S. and Europe, and is held in the collections of most major public galleries in Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. His work is also held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where in 1970 he was included in the seminal exhibition Information, which helped cement conceptual art as a defining artistic movement. In 1995, he was awarded the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. Gerald Ferguson’s estate is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, and CANADA, New York.