Opening Reception for the Artist: Saturday, May 3rd, 2014, 12pm to 6pm
Exhibition will continue through June 28, 2014

Kohn Gallery announces the inaugural exhibition of its new, expansive 12,000-square foot space: new work by Los Angeles-based, Pop-Surrealist artist Mark Ryden. Mark Ryden, The Gay 90s: West will be on view at the new Kohn Gallery, 1227 N. Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038, from May 3 through June 28, 2014.

Designed by Malibu-based architect Lester Tobias, the new gallery building features an immense space with 22-foot ceilings, allowing for stunning exhibitions on a monumental scale. This design also incorporates a massive glass window along Highland Avenue and extensive skylights to bathe the gallery with natural light. With an eye always towards the future, the Kohn Gallery will utilize this expansive new exhibition space to continue to mount bold exhibitions of established and emerging artists.

In the inaugural exhibition Mark Ryden, underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten "Gay 90s". Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America—women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages—Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture. This important new body of work—which includes paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculpture—negotiates the aesthetic value of clichéd nostalgia through the lens of polished neoclassic painting, and will include Ryden's largest and most ambitious work to date, The Parlor (Allegory of Magic, Quintessence and Divine Mystery): a 96 x 120 inch painting with a wooden frame hand-carved in bas-relief.

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KOHN GALLERY'S INAUGURAL EXHIBITION IN NEW 12,000 SQ FT GALLERY AT 1227 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE, HOLLYWOOD:

MARK RYDEN THE GAY 90s: WEST