Ryan McGinness
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Ryan McGinness (born Virginia Beach, Virginia, 1972) is an American painter and designer, living and working in New York City. He studied at the Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts, located at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also was in a curatorial internship at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Known for working with layered silkscreens, and a fusion between design work and fine art, he has authored nine books, including Flatnessisgod (1999), Luxurygood, Vocabularytest, Pieceofmind, Sponsorship, Project Rainbow, and Multiverse. In 2005, Rizzoli New York published an artist monograph on Ryan McGinness called Installationview with critical essays by A.A. Bronson, Jeffrey Deitch, Carlo McCormick, and Randy Gladman.
McGinness is represented by Deitch Projects [1] in New York. He has shown internationally at galleries and museums such as PS1 Contemporary Art Center [2] in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art [3], the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver [4], the Mori Art Museum [5] in Tokyo, and The Royal Academy [6] in London.
Expounding from his background in the design industry, Ryan McGinness’s work presents the clinical graphic logos of mass media as vast contemplative fields of meditation. Woven together with delicate intricacy, McGinness’s forms converge in a kaleidoscope of free-flowing associations. Stylised motifs, calligraphic patterns and abstracted tattoo-like insignia overlap in spellbinding mandalas.
Extending beyond Pop’s elevation of marketing logos to art, McGinness pushes his work into the realm of the commodity. His output spans from traditional paintings to video, installations and works presenting a range of consumer products, fusing high and low culture through the language of advertising.
Partaking in mark-making as a timeless form of communication, McGinness’s process of painting is devoid of the artist’s expressive gesture. His ultra-smooth surfaces are embellished through veneers of spray paint and silk-screen, coining seamlessly manufactured fields free from personal contact. Although he replicates styles and designs that seem innately familiar, McGinness’s iconography is entirely his own.
Effecting a ‘copy’ for which there is no original, McGinness presents a system of signs and signifiers that are infinitely unfixed and universal. Using typography as a tool of abstraction, McGinness exceeds the notion of painting as objective field; instead, his work reconstitutes beauty and spirituality as a bi-product of technology and virtual experience.
[edit] External links
- The Saatchi Gallery; About Ryan McGinness and His Art Includes information on Ryan McGinness such as his artworks, articles, and full biography
- Iconoclast USA Biography of Ryan McGinness
- Profile of Ryan McGinness from Strength Magazine, January 2002
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