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Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron

Past exhibition
December 10, 2015 – January 23, 2016 293 Tenth Avenue, New York
  • Works
  • About the Artist
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  • 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.

  • Installation view, Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, December 10, 2015 – Janurary 23, 2016 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Installation view, Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, December 10, 2015 – Janurary 23, 2016 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Installation view, Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, December 10, 2015 – Janurary 23, 2016 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Installation view, Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, December 10, 2015 – Janurary 23, 2016 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Installation view, Mark Ryden: Dodecahedron New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, December 10, 2015 – Janurary 23, 2016 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
  • 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.

     

  • Works
    • Mark Ryden, Anatomia (#109), 2014
      Mark Ryden, Anatomia (#109), 2014
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    • Mark Ryden, Aurora (#114), 2015
      Mark Ryden, Aurora (#114), 2015
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    • Mark Ryden, Chroma Structure 113 (#113), 2015
      Mark Ryden, Chroma Structure 113 (#113), 2015
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    • Mark Ryden, Dymaxion Principle (#110), 2014
      Mark Ryden, Dymaxion Principle (#110), 2014
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      %3Cspan%20class%3D%22title%22%3E%3Cspan%20class%3D%22artist%22%3EMark%20Ryden%3Cspan%20class%3D%22artist_comma%22%3E%3Cspan%20class%3D%22comma%22%3E%2C%20%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3Cspan%20class%3D%22title%22%3EDymaxion%20Principle%20%28%23110%29%3Cspan%20class%3D%22title_comma%22%3E%3Cspan%20class%3D%22comma%22%3E%2C%20%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3Cspan%20class%3D%22year%22%3E2014%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E
  • About the Artist

    Mark Ryden
    Portrait by Christopher French.

    Mark Ryden

    Blending themes of pop culture with techniques reminiscent of the old masters, Mark Ryden has devised a singular style that blurs traditional boundaries. His work first garnered attention in the 1990s as he ushered in a new genre of painting, “Pop Surrealism,” which developed the scope and spirit of the 20th century surrealism by embellishing its vocabulary with contemporary cultural references.

    Ryden’s work exquisitely renders a universe replete with fantastical characters amid enchanted landscapes that embody the artist’s meticulously realized signature blend of archetype, kitsch, and narrative mysticism. Ryden’s modern mythologies inseparably interweave twin senses of comfort and menace. “Most of my work engages with the relationship between the physical world and the spiritual world,” he has said. His are scenes that exist in the ambiguous space between these two realms, in which nostalgia—and by extension memory, even death—are ever-present.

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Back to Past exhibitions

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New York
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Friday, 10am–4pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

 

Kasmin Sculpture Garden

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On view from The High Line at 27th Street
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info@kasmingallery.com

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