Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) is a New York-based sculptor. Insistent on their physicality, Ryan’s sculptures recast found and handmade objects as spectacular, larger-than-life hieroglyphs of Americana. Her mediums, which range from bowling balls to a deconstructed Airstream camper, are both familiar and iconographic, and seemingly lost in time. These materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent: delicate, sensual grapes are rendered with heavy, utilitarian concrete; mold colonies are composed of semi-precious gemstones. As in Dutch vanitas paintings, the relics of the everyday—seed pods, jewelry, domestic fixtures, moldy fruit—become tongue-in-cheek allegories for sexuality, decadence, and the cycle of life.
Read MoreAfter studying archaeology and art as an undergraduate at Pitzer College, Ryan pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied under artists Charles Ray and Catherine Opie. She has held institutional solo exhibitions at New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK (2019); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2019); Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai (2018); and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2017).
Her work is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Cc Foundation and Art Centre, Shanghai; Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
Text courtesy Karma.
