“The art historian in me is fascinated by situations where an artist’s work is indisputably important but the artist hasn’t received their due,” said Fergus McCaffrey founder of the eponymous gallery. The Dublin-born dealer founded Fergus McCaffrey in 2006 and since then has exhibited artists who have been unrepresented alongside established and emerging figures.
The gallery has played an especially important role in introducing postwar Japanese art to an American audience. It represents Gutai luminaries Sadamasa Motonaga, Kazuo Shiraga, Toshio Yoshida, and Saburo Murakami; Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, both of who were founders of the avant-garde collective Hi-Red-Center; as well as Noriyuki Haraguchi and Hitoshi Nomura who are seminal figures of later 1960s Mono-Ha. The gallery has regularly exhibited the work of Sigmar Polke and Andy Warhol and has nurtured the careers of Richard Nonas, Marcia Hafif, Birgit Jürgenssen and Jack Early, whose largest solo exhibition to date is currently on view at the gallery.
“Having an art gallery allows us to make the case for figures who have not been represented properly, or who had major representation early on but then fell off the radar like Jack Early and Marcia Hafif. Our exhibitions allow us present the work in the way it deserves, at a scale that is fitting. Then we can invite visitors to come to their own conclusions,” McCaffrey explained.