Like a patient gardener, Ryan Wallace cyclically tends, gleans, and prunes his work as former efforts become a soil that cultivates the new. His projects are sustained through continuous cycles of creation, destruction, flattening, and rebuilding. In paintings constructed from strips of canvas, screens, tiles, metallic tapes and errant found objects, each piece holds a history of its own making. It is self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, self-determined, in a way that cultivates organic development.
In his new paintings, Wallace takes inspiration from light refractions cast upon the walls and ceilings by shimmering elements within one of his recent floor installations. These fleeting shapes are cut and rendered into controlled compositions that memorialize an unexpected byproduct of a previous artwork. Prompted by observation, his latest series abstracts after being filtered through the physical space of reality, adding a new schism to his approach. The ethereal becomes tangible while finding purpose as another element in the continuous mapping of Wallace's terrain. This floor installation, titled Pitch, has itself been resurrected, augmented, and installed upright, as a monolithic tribute to the genesis of the paintings on view. Captured reflections float like wraiths in and out of the pictures throughout the room, while new reflections are generated, in real time, throughout the gallery.
Repeated shapes in the paintings shift in scale, material, and color from piece to piece, insinuating the passage of time provided by light cast in a singular space. These optical and physical permutations appear simultaneously gossamer and concrete as dense materials are used to depict airy suspension and flickering shadow. Fabric, perspex, masonite and metals are seamed into the surface of the works as often as canvas is painted upon. The artist’s hybrid technique, used to address painting’s concerns of surface, space, shape and arrangement, is applied with haughty defiance to medium specificity. Through this approach Wallace reinforces holistic circularity and allows his body of work to again cultivate itself, as the present rises from the past, both physically and visually.
Ryan Wallace was born in 1977 in New York City, and lives and works in Brooklyn and East Hampton, New York. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include 56 Henry, NYC; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at BAM, Brooklyn; Gerhard Hofland Gallery, Amsterdam; Boeske & Hofland, Leipzig; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Jerome Pauchant Gallery, Paris; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, NYC. Wallace’s works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; SF MoMA, San Francisco; Watermill Center, Watermill; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others.
Concurrent to the exhibition BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to feature an exhibition of assemblage, collage and work on paper in the Gallery’s Private View. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is considered among the foremost artists of the postwar era. Coming of age during the Sixties, Conner was at the forefront of a Cultural Revolution set against the stark backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Summer of Love. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war and the prevailing Conservative Capitalist Culture, Conner and his peers sought an alterative lifestyle and value system that has much to say to us today.
