Ryan McGinness: Dark Energy (Pearl White)
Ryan McGinness’ work consists of an amalgam of icons and symbols. Drawing from his background in graphic design and skate culture, McGinness’ paintings and drawings resolve the clinical graphic aesthetics of media as vast, kinetic fields of color and imagery.
His heavily process-based approach spans both the analog and the digital: the symbols that appear throughout the last 25 years of his practice begin with original sketches, which he then converts into flattened vector files in order to reproduce the same image at any scale. These computer images are then used to create stencils for a screenprinting process he uses to compose the majority of his work. Utilizing a variety of matte, pearlescent and fluorescent acrylic inks as well at metal leaf, he combines graphic over graphic, which the artist considers as painted drawings that are individually replicated and decontextualized into a densely layered abstraction.
His Dark Energy works make use of intricate, circular, and symmetrical patterns created using mathematical curves, emerging from a point inside or outside a circle that rolls within or around another circle. This shape is a representative motif for McGinness, and when repeated and emphasized by the use of the black light, chaos and order exist simultaneously, suggesting black holes and gravitational pulls into outer space.
Ryan McGinness (b. 1972, Virginia Beach, VA) has artwork in major permanent collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Cincinnati Art Museum; MUSAC, Léon, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery; The Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; The Misumi Collection, Tokyo, Japan; and The Charles Saatchi Collection, among many others. McGinness lives and works in New York City.
