Kathleen Ryan

The exhibition KATHLEEN RYAN will present the first museum survey of the American artist Kathleen Ryan (born 1984). A selection of around thirty works will trace the development of her sculptural practice from 2014 until the present day, including a number of new works produced specially for the exhibition.

Ranging in size from the monumental to the handheld, Ryan's sculptures incorporate found, foraged and repurposed materials to portray objects drawn from everyday life: flowers, fruit and vegetables, jewellery, spiders' webs, and flocks of birds, to name just a few. The materials that she chooses are often at odds with the subjects that they portray: bunches of grapes are cast in heavy concrete, necklaces are strung together from bowling balls, the rind of a melon is fashioned from a disassembled Airstream camper, towering neo-classical columns are pieced together using delicate panels of glazed ceramic, and mould on the skin of a peach is meticulously rendered using hundreds of semi-precious gemstones. Through a combination of awe, humour and repulsion, her works encourage us to think about ideas of wealth and waste, of decadence and sexuality, the cycle of consumption and the cycle of life.

Kathleen Ryan lives and works in New York. She was awarded the Rosa Schapire Art Prize of the Freunde der Kunsthalle e.V. in 2020.

Supported by: Freunde der Kunsthalle e.V.