Mark Ryden
The Gay 90s: West
May 3–June 28, 2014
Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Kohn Gallery announces the inaugural exhibition of its new, expansive 12,000-square-foot space with new work by Los Angeles-based, Pop-Surrealist artist Mark Ryden. Mark Ryden, The Gay 90s: West will be on view at the Kohn Gallery, 1227 N. Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038, from May 3 through June 28.
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 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-by-120-inch painting with a wooden frame hand-carved in bas relief.
Known for both his imaginative subject matter and consummate skill as a painter, Ryden’s work is influenced by both the French 19th-century painter of pristine portraits Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, where offbeat subject matter is rendered in traditionally beautiful painting technique. His simultaneously nostalgic and dystopian narratives underscore our culture’s attraction and repulsion to kitsch, while linking its ebb and flow as an accepted notion of taste to larger periods of art history.
Mark Ryden explores Victorian decorative design, clichéd notions of “Main Street USA,” small business and immigration, and vaudeville shows with a dark and complex sentimentality. Integrating the Christ figure and Abraham Lincoln with his wide-eyed, petticoat clad ingénues, Ryden presents the viewer with an unreal and very oddly camp version of American history. His is an exploration of what becomes cliché, what becomes kitsch and what becomes forgotten. Yet through it all Ryden makes some of the most richly rendered, beautifully glazed, idealized yet disturbing works of contemporary art. Like his contemporaries John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Neo Rauch, Mark Ryden uses a skillfully honed technique to render his polished and emotionally charged works.
This exhibition that opens on May 3 is a continuation of his show The Gay 90s: Olde Tyme Art Show that took place in 2010 at the Kasmin Gallery, New York. The Los Angeles exhibition at the Kohn Gallery will include his now-famous painting of a meat dress (made popular by Lady Gaga), Incarnation, 2009, along with numerous other smaller paintings and works on paper. Finally, the artist will make a site-specific installation that consists of found and crafted objects that relate to this specific body of work.
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