Mark Ryden’s paintings of wide-eyed Victorian children, Abraham Lincoln, and grade-A beef wed lowbrow culture with highbrow surrealism. VIEW OUR GALLERY.
Sweet Wishes, an animated short by Mark Ryden and his wife, Marion Peck, offers a succinct insight into the 47-year-old artist’s surreal aesthetic.
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Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances."- The Dalai Lama
The above is a quote offered up by painter Mark Ryden when asked about the meaning behind his current exhibition, The Snow Yak Show, which opened in February at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery, and featured an array of work set in a mystical snow encrusted land populated by ghostly pale moon children and highly uncanny yet benevolent creatures.
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A first round of press releases announced the lineup for this show, guest-curated by Kristine McKenna, as a trio to include two late West Coast artists represented by the Michael Kohn Gallery (Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner), a bankable New York artist (Richard Prince), and one common denominator: The oeuvres of all three involve lots of images of women. With Conner now removed from the equation, this marketing strategy/curatorial premise seems stripped. Conner, who had some of the romance and funk of Berman and also the sometimes-odd combination of coolness and indulgence of Prince, could have been the bridge in this exhibition. Without his presence, the show offers less an arc of sensibility than a comparison of two artists’ forays into imagery of women, and becomes a study in how two rather different artists have examined the ways in which culture inscribes itself onto women’s bodies and persons, and how the artists go about such inscription, too. As such, it remains worth catching before it closes on March 7.
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As artists’ biographies go, those of Wallace Berman and Richard Prince could hardly be more different. Berman, who died at 50 in 1976, the victim of a drunken driver, was a kind of Beat guru flying just below the radar, showing his work in only one conventional gallery exhibition during his lifetime and popping into rare view in strange places: a cameo in “Easy Rider”; the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” where his face is wedged next to Tony Curtis’s, just below Jung’s.
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The Valkyrie landed at André Schlechtriem Gallery on a recent Saturday evening to bear a new star, Rosa Loy, into the firmament: Rachel Feinstein, riding her hot new show at Boesky; Lisa Yuskavage, who penned Rosa’s catalogue essay; Pattie Cronin, just awarded a Tiffany grant; Jane Kaplowitz, who hosted the after-party; and Deborah Kass, gleefully clutching a photo of her iconic creation Double Yentl, autographed that afternoon by both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at a Sheraton Hotel fundraiser in midtown.
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The opening reception for Mark Ryden’s new exhibition, “The Tree Show” at Michael Kohn Gallery, was six hours long. If you glanced at the invitation beforehand, you might have thought this was a misprint. Six hours? Two is customary. Three is generous. Six, you might be forgiven for concluding, falls somewhere between pointless and pretentious. But then you would be seriously underestimating both the breadth and the fervor of Ryden’s fan base. In fact, the extension was merely practical.
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Time is forever. Love is the goal. Art is what you are, not what you do. Many young artists and poets in California in the 1950s and ’60s felt and lived this way. And a traveling band of them, trailing a cloud of marijuana-fragrant air, has arrived at the Grey Art Gallery in “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle.”
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Rosa Loy seems to be one of the few hot young Leipzig painters who is not a man -- a pleasant change of pace -- and the canvases in her first solo show in New York exude an easy command. Still, they bear an undue resemblance to those of the best-known artist of the Leipzig group, Neo Rauch, who happens to be her husband and studiomate. The similarities include stylized quasi-illustrational figures, retro fashions, disorienting settings and rich, complementary color schemes.
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