Ryan McGinness: Signals Painting 5

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 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, described as painted drawings individually replicated into a densely layered abstraction.

 

In his Signals project he focuses on the icons themselves divorced from the decorative filigree imagery often layered in his works. These original images, called “elements,” are part of his vast visual language and are the building blocks to almost all of his paintings. When they are combined and layered, their decontextualized forms build upon one other and form “Units of Meaning,” as prescribed by McGinness himself. 

 

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; the 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, New York.