Dan Ferguson Exhibition Launching September 24th at Canvas Galleries

We are delighted to present a brand-new exhibition by contemporary artist Dan Ferguson, opening on September 24th at Canvas Galleries. 

Endless Summer is a new body of work by Belfast-based artist Dan Ferguson. The paintings embody the spirit of holidaying from a bygone era of the holiday brochure.

In a pre-internet age of 1960s high-street travel agents, to 1980s Teletext pages touting exclusive deals just at the other end of a premium number phone number, a holiday abroad offered an oasis of possibility, opportunity, otherness.

Central to this dream was the travel brochure - a bible filled with near-mythical images of regular people experiencing varying levels of extreme joy.

Hundreds of pages of irregular mini-stories depicted him/her/them at the airport, on the plane, at the hotel, by the pool, on the beach, at the restaurant, at the bar… and repeat.

Every year, just after Christmas, the new sunshine-seeker brochures would be released. The thick stack of colour pages were a portal to warm breezes, late nights, white stone buildings set against the deepest blue skies, crisp shadows on quiet lanes, the sounds of tavernas and tapas bars, warm waves lapping sandy shores.

My paintings intend to invite the viewer to place themselves as both onlooker and protagonist. I would like you to smell the heat and suncream, sip a cocktail and slip on some shades as you journey through the endless summer.

In this modern age of performative ‘sharing’, we can/might forget that in the recent past, holidays were punctuated by very limited visual records. With no mobile phones and the most rudimentary portable cameras, the missing details in our photo albums were recalled with memory, in stories that found a way to exist within us long beyond the trip.

The paintings explore the redolent artifice and occasional truth of brochure living, leaning into a chorus of colour, and celebrating a discrete homage to compositional figurative arrangements from Renaissance to Baroque movements.

In those simpler times. brochures somehow harnessed the scent of an endless summer, evoking memory into tangible form, and creating a longing to return.

Join us for the public opening on September 24th at Canvas Galleries and discover Dan Ferguson’s latest collection—a nostalgic and colourful journey inspired by the golden age of travel and vintage imagery.

RSVP by emailing sales@canvasgalleries.com