Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce Dodecahedron, Mark Ryden’s second exhibition at the gallery, on view at 293 10th Avenue from December 10, 2015 - January 23, 2016. Dodecahedron features the Los Angeles-based artist’s first-ever bronze sculpture, along with eight new paintings, drawings, color studies and a new porcelain edition.

The vocabulary of images in Ryden’s new body of work remains consistent with his pervasive distortion of scale and his iconic fairytale-like creatures set against seductive landscapes of untouched beauty. However, the subject of his latest series is informed by the geometric structure “dodecahedron,” a solid figure bearing twelve sides whose perfect symmetry has been the source of extensive query by mathematicians and scientists since antiquity. Drawing upon the form’s mystery and divine connotations as a source of inspiration, Ryden explores the bridge between the physical world and the intangible realm.

For the exhibition, Ryden created his first sculpture cast from bronze. Measuring one meter in height, the work consists of twelve pentagonal panels that join together to form a dodecahedron. Each panel is individually cast and features images and motifs that have been prevalent throughout the artist’s oeuvre such as; the tree, the eye, the fetus, the bee, the ammonite, and Abraham Lincoln.

Ryden’s labor-intensive canvases skillfully rework centuries of art history, combining the grandeur of Spanish and Italian religious painting with the decorative richness of Old Master compositions and the lush textures of French Neo-Classicism. Expanding on these concepts, the artist’s paintings focus on “the soul confronting its physical form” as represented by his reoccurring feminine child figure, he calls “anima” or “soul” figure. These anima figures appear under different guises, such as in Anatomia, 2015 and Aurora, 2015. For the artist, they represent the part of us that wonders at the elegant mathematics that exists underneath everything and the sacred geometry that constructs our physical world.