Cordy Ryman

Last updated
Cordy Ryman
Born
New York City, US
Education BFA, School of Visual Arts
Known for Sculpture, Painting, Installation art
AwardsRhodes Family Award for Excellence, School of Visual Arts, 1997; Helen Foster Barnett Prize, National Academy Museum, 2006.

Cordy Ryman (born New York City), an artist based in New York City. Ryman earned his BFA with Honors in Fine Arts and Art Education from The School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. He is the son of artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019). Cordy Ryman is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery, New York, NY.

Contents

Works

Ryman’s early works were emotion based figurative sculptures but within his first year at art school he began to experiment with abstract representations. During his second year at The School of Visual Arts he was working on small scale collages. [1] This is where Ryman began to develop his current casualist style. [2]

Cordy Ryman, "V.I.P." 2014, acrylic, shellac and enamel on wood, 30 1/2 x 28 x 2 1/2 inches Cordy Ryman VIP 2014 acrylic shellac enamel on wood 30 1/2 " x 28" x 2 1/2 ".jpg
Cordy Ryman, “V.I.P." 2014, acrylic, shellac and enamel on wood, 30½ x 28 x 2½ inches

Ryman's artwork is casual in style and fabricated with recycled wood and metal painted and reconstructed with sculptural elements, mimicking the traditional canvas in their display. [2] The materials Ryman uses include wood, gorilla glue, scrap metals, studio sweepings, acrylic and enamel paints and other found objects. When working with wood, he often keeps the rough jagged edges visible. This creates a very tactile surface. Ryman alters the surfaces of his artwork to change the appearance but still allows for the character of the materials to be recognized. [3]

He sometimes combines mostly mute colors-white, silver, and creamy oranges- with small touches of bright hues on the edges and seams of his work. The end result is a fluorescent glow that is reflected onto the gallery spaces and the artwork itself. [4] In a 2009 interview with Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail, Ryman says of his attention to the edges of his paintings: "I guess the main thing about the edges and the sides is that I think about them. In one way or another they are considered. When the sides are painted or accounted for in some way, it makes the piece as a whole seem more like a thing or an independent entity as opposed to a picture of something." [5]

His works range from small to large and often interact with the spaces in which they are presented. When Ryman works on a smaller scale his paintings tend to be saturated with paint transforming the nature of the scrap materials he works with. The undulating surfaces of these works push the boundary between sculpture and painting. [6]

When Ryman creates work on a larger scale the pieces interact with unique properties of the installation space. Such pieces are found in the corners of spaces or rising and falling from the walls. [7] In Ryman’s 2010 solo exhibition at DCKT Contemporary he showed the work Red Brick which consisted of a series of cut and painted wooden “bricks” stacked upon one another in varying shades of red and pink. In this work Ryman questions geometry, order, and the nature of painting itself. [8]

Permanent Collections

Awards

Recent Solo exhibitions

Recent Group exhibitions


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Spero</span> American artist (1926-2009)

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.

Robert Ryman was an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He was best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lived and worked in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Katz</span> American artist (born 1927)

Alex Katz is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.

Philip Martin Pearlstein was an American painter best known for Modernist Realist nudes. Cited by critics as the preeminent figure painter of the 1960s to 2000s, he led a revival in realist art.

Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter. His geometrically oriented abstract paintings were influenced by Piet Mondrian and he is a follow er of the Hard-edge school. His best-known paintings constitute maximally reduced forms, characterized by just two colors on a canvas meeting in a sharply delineated edge, often on an unframed canvas of unusual shape. His work is represented in many museums in the United States, Europe, and South America. Thanks to a generous bequest from the artist, the Brooklyn Museum has 27 of his paintings on permanent display.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Root</span> American painter

Ruth Root is an American artist based in New York.

<i>The Brooklyn Rail</i> Journal of arts, culture and politics

The Brooklyn Rail is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The Rail is based in Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater.

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014. In 2015, The New York Observer called him a "ringmaster" of the "Kings County art world." Bui was the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothea Rockburne</span> Canadian-American painter (born c. 1932)

Dorothea Rockburne DFA is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Saul</span> American painter (born 1934)

Peter Saul is an American painter. His work has connections with Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His early use of pop culture cartoon references in the late 1950s and very early 1960s situates him as one of the fathers of the Pop Art movement. He realised about 800 paintings during his career.

Don Voisine is an American abstract painter living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, USA. In the fall of 2016, "X/V," a 15 year survey of his work, was organized by the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME. In 1997 he was elected a member of American Abstract Artists and became President of the group in 2004. Voisine was elected to the National Academy in 2010. His work is included in the public collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Cincinnati Art Museum,Cincinnati, OH; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; the Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT and the National Academy, New York, NY.

Joe Bradley is an American visual artist, known for his minimalist and color field paintings. He is also the former lead singer of the punk band Cheeseburger. Bradley has been based in New York City and Amagansett.

Irving Sandler was an American art critic, art historian, and educator. He provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionism in the 1950s. He also managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York Artists Club of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations at the Cedar Street Tavern and other art venues. Al Held named him, "Our Boswell of the New York scene," and Frank O'Hara immortalized him as the "balayeur des artistes" because of Sandler's constant presence and habit of taking notes at art world events. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

David Reed is a contemporary American conceptual and visual artist.

Brion Nuda Rosch is an American visual artist. He is based in San Francisco, California.

Ellen Phelan is an American artist known especially as a painter of formalist abstractions, psychologically charged scenes enacted by dolls, and landscapes.

Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper. She described her work as "a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view."

Paul Pagk is an abstract painter born in England, UK in 1962. He moved to France in 1973. He lives and works in New York City since 1988.

David Humphrey is an American painter, art critic, and sculptor associated with the postmodern turn in painting that began in the late 1970s. He is best known for his playful, cartoonish, puzzling paintings, which blend figuration and abstraction and create "allegories" about the medium of painting itself. Humphrey holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (1977) and a MA from New York University (1980), where he studied with film critic Annette Michelson; he also attended the New York Studio School from 1996 – 1997. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Rome Prize in 2008, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2011. He was born in Augsburg Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lives and works in New York City.

David Ross Novros, is an American artist. He is known for his minimalist geometric paintings, shaped canvases, and his use of color. He has also studied fresco painting extensively.

References

  1. Ward, Terry (2011). "Interview with Cordy Ryman". The New York Art World .
  2. 1 2 Butler, Sharon L. (June 3, 2011). "ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists". brooklynrail.org. Retrieved Sep 10, 2020.
  3. Longhi, Tomassio (2006). "Cordy Ryman: School Daze at Carol Shen Gallery". The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture .
  4. Davison, Dave R. (2008). "Ryman brings raw edge to Traver". Tacoma Weekly .
  5. Bui, Phong (January 2009). "In Conversation: Cordy Ryman with Phong Bui". The Brooklyn Rail.
  6. Kangas, Matthew (2003). "Artists continue the Evolution of Abstract Painting". The Seattle Times .
  7. Smith, Roberta (2005). "Art Review: Making an Entrance at Any Age". The New York Times .
  8. Conner, Jill (2010). "Cordy Ryman". Art in America .

Cordy Ryman. [1]