Ryan Sullivan joins BLUM
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, November 8, 2024


Ryan Sullivan joins BLUM
Ryan Sullivan, Untitled, 2023, Photo: Lance Brewer.



LOS ANGELES, CA.- BLUM announced the representation of New York-based artist Ryan Sullivan on the occasion of his first solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation also marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Sullivan will be represented by BLUM, in collaboration with Sadie Coles HQ in London and Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne.

Sullivan’s work commingles painting’s formal concerns and sculpture’s preoccupation with materiality. Where traditional painting builds out from the canvas, covering or obscuring the gestures that preceded, Sullivan’s process functions in the inverse—the first layer of resin forms the work’s initial structure and, later, becomes the object’s face. Thin and flat, unlike any oil or acrylic on stretched canvas ever could be, these resin paintings—with their smooth, matte surface—flaunt the duality of their station, defying art’s conventionally divided medium specificities of painting and sculpture.

Using a liquid urethane, Sullivan initiates his resin casts by distributing this material within a rectangular, silicone mold on the floor. Each pour, brushstroke, or application of pigment is a unique gesture—unable to be replicated or restaged—for which the finished work, after curing overnight, becomes a receipt frozen in time and evidencing its own making. Sullivan reveals and encounters the work’s composition for the first time once it sets and is no longer subject to change—each work an anomaly intuited into being. These unique circumstances—the three-dimensionality of the material, its drying speed, and the inverted image-making—all create novel problems that the artist must solve.

Once framed and hung to command the wall space that paintings have long occupied, the tonal quality, movement, and spatial tension confound expectation. With the artist’s unique process, the formal properties historically attributed to painting—focal points, light and shadow, palette—remain hallmarks despite their having been produced by a vehicle less often associated with this format. Though painting might be judged for its depictions—the world it creates—Sullivan’s resins are inseparable from the materiality that grants them their aesthetic qualities; in this way and within this discourse, they are paradoxically both resonant and solipsistic.

Similar to sculptors, Sullivan’s work is constructed via a material that structures itself, allowing it to function in dimensional space. The artist forms elegant mass from resin—slowly compounding upon nothing in order to fabricate impossibly slim objects that are composed of their own process and appear as if suspended in mid-gesture. Painting on canvas is additive, but its core purpose is more so about what it portrays over its components. Sullivan’s output acknowledges art’s previously discrete ontologies relating to medium, and unflinchingly moves beyond them. Sculpting resin in a flat space is how Sullivan composes paintings—instinctually laying down an image and repeating the act until solid materiality can be achieved. These works crystallize their own spatial conjuring and behave as non-traditional paintings that, despite appearing as abstractions, categorize as material realism.

Ryan Sullivan (b. 1983, Malone, NY) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Sullivan was the subject of a significant solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL in 2015 with an accompanying catalog. The artist’s work has also been featured in exhibitions at public institutions, including Abstraction (re)creation, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); Aspen Art Week, Aspen Museum, Aspen, CO (2022); En Plein Air, The High Line, New York, NY (2019); Black Hole. Art and Materiality from Informal to Invisible, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2018); Good Dreams, Bad Dreams, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); New York Painting, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015); Surface Tension, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Empire State, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rom­­e, Italy (2013), and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010). Work by Sullivan is represented in numerous public collections including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; ­­­Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Sullivan lives and works in New York, NY.










Today's News

April 24, 2024

460 years ago, Shakespeare was born here. Or somewhere.

Britain memorializes a queen, with smiles and bronze corgis

Hall of Fame Pitcher Walter Johnson's 104-year-old photo-matched jersey brings the heat at Heritage Auctions in May

Newly unearthed Agnes Pelton painting leads Heritage's American Art Auction

Tiffany Studios, Gallé and R. Lalique take Heritage's Art Nouveau, Art Deco & Art Glass Event to $1.33 million

Lots of Italy, on many collectible plates

Bob Heil, whose innovations enhanced the sound of rock, dies at 83

Christie's presents the Rosa de la Cruz Collection

Chistie's to sell the personal wardrobe of pioneering fashion designer Vivienne Westwood

Ryan Sullivan joins BLUM

The Brooklyn Museum expands curatorial department with two new appointments

Holabird announces results of Wild West Relics Auction

Did wolves revive Yellowstone?

'Grenfell' listens to the survivors of a towering inferno

Marjane Satrapi on resistance in Iran: 'A Real Revolution Is Cultural'

'Patriots' review: What happened to the man who made Putin?

It's all right to groove to Huey in 'The Heart of Rock and Roll'

Phyllis Pressman, luxury superstore matriarch, is dead at 95

PEN America cancels literary awards ceremony amid Gaza fallout

For her Met Opera debut, Lileana Blain-Cruz directs 'El Niño'

Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, dies at 80

Fine Art and Furniture & Decorations Departments lead April Gallery Auction




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful