Preview: “Mark Ryden: The Gay 90s: West” at Michael Kohn Gallery

by Nastia Voynovskaya

Influential Pop Surrealist pioneer Mark Ryden has a solo show coming up on May 3 at Michael Kohn Gallery in LA. “The Gay 90s: West” is a continuation of Ryden’s Gay 90s series (the works on paper from which were recently featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 28). Full of double-entendres and subtly suggestive imagery, the ongoing body of work imaginatively focuses on the early 20th-century nostalgia for the 1890s (an uncanny parallel to today’s fixation on the 1990s in the fashion industry). Ryden’s account of the Gay 90s is by no means a historically-accurate one, filled with doll-like nymphs and bizarre happenings. The exhibition will include some of Ryden’s most famous work from the past few years, including Incarnation (the piece that depicts a character donning the meat dress that inspired Lady Gaga’s infamous one) and The Parlor (Allegory of Magic, Quintessence and Divine Mystery), which we saw at Michael Kohn’s booth at Art Basel.