NEW YORK, NY.- Isis Phoenix Arts is presenting Ryan Ostrowski: Tribal Pop* Residency, a solo exhibition and artist residency at 317 Grand St, NYC. Ryan Ostrowski's Tribal Pop features canvases & works on paper painted between 2012 and 2014, characterized by the artist's emblematic statement on contemporary culture blending an uncanny Surrealist sensibility with popular iconography and references to tribal art.
Ostrowski has been a filmmaker since his teens, and embraces painting as a link to an interest in facial expression, and to parallel, a paradoxical fascination with masks, which conceal facial expression. These outlets converge in the contemporary cult of celebrity. Celebrities present a mask to the world which is a simplified alter ego; a selectively condensed and commercially valuable individuality.
Ryan Ostrowski: Tribal Pop unfolds the artist's line of inquiry into societal malfunction, and questioning the overwhelming hyper-tech, social media-obsessed and sensationalist attitudes of the Now. Ostrowski writes, "What does it all mean? These little pieces that fit together so perfectly. I look no further than the mask. It's heavy on my heart and mind because I wear one. I have from an early age, and he does, and she does and you do too.”
British Art Historian Edward Lucie-Smith has written: "Ostrowski's 'Tribal Pop' with keen intelligence and a well-developed sense of humor, is presenting us with a modern harlequinade. In the same way his forbear G.D. Tiepolo achieved with his wonderful series of drawings illustrating the life and adventures of Punchinello (who, of course, wears a grotesque mask). Ostrowski's examination of Early Modernism, his ironic relationship with '60s Pop (which took itself much more seriously than he does) and his experience with moving images, equip him to present the culture of modern celebrity as a comic-ironic spectacle. Into this he is even able to introduce major images from the past, because these too have in a certain sense become 'celebs'. It's the only way we can deal with them, in terms of the culture we now possess."
Ostrowski conceived of his first body of work while travelling through North America, before returning to New York City to explore symbolism, visual language, and the role of the "mask" in western culture. The works on view are exemplary of the complex fluid patterns, wide color palette and the intersection between this device and the subject, making Ostrowski's work dynamic and arresting.
Ryan Ostrowski will be working in residence for the duration of the exhibition.
