For his first museum solo exhibition, New York-based artist Ryan Sullivan highlights a series of large-scale works from the past two years, featuring non-compositional forms and an organic color palette that is alternately vivid, murky, and sublime.
In his distinctive approach to painting, Sullivan proposes new relationships between image and object as he negotiates his own subjective decision making with the radical agency of his medium. Staging complex interactions of materials, he produces images that are seemingly in motion, alive, and contingent in their embodiment and description of material flows. Despite their robust physicality, the absence of traditional gesture, and the sheer uniqueness of their facture, these works can be discussed in terms of process inasmuch as the studio is today more than ever a mediated site that informs the reception of painting. Transcendent of medium and process, Sullivan’s works offer critical solutions to a world in which abstraction has taken on a life of its own.
Ryan Sullivan (b. 1983, New York) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2005. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Hydra’s Workshop, Hydra, Greece; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and MoMA PS1, New York. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the University of Chicago. Ryan Sullivan currently lives and works in New York.
This exhibition is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Deputy Director and Chief Curator.
Exhibitions at ICA Miami are made possible in part through a generous gift from John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Major support for "Ryan Sullivan" provided by ICA's Founder Circle. Additional support provided by Maccarone, New York and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
