Ryan McGinness: New Narratives

RYAN McGINNESS NARRATIVES

511 West 22nd Street York NY 10011 West 22nd Street York NY 10011 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

PUZZLING NEW NARRATIVES

By Hilarie M. Sheets

Ryan McGinness is a self-professed puzzler. The artist applies the term liter ally, referring to the activity of putting together jigsaw puzzles, something he enjoys doing at home with his wife and two young daughters, particularly in pandemic times. He also recently turned one of his hyper-baroque silkscreen paintings from his Mindscapes series—a psychedelic mash-up of hundreds of the individual symbolic drawings that have formed the foundation of his art practice—into an actual 1,000-piece puzzle through a licensing agreement with Four Point Puzzles. But the idea of breaking down the world into con stituent pieces that are then recombined into a new cosmos is fundamental to McGinness’s overall vision, which is at once systematic and surreal.

In the most personal show of his career, called New Narratives, McGinness is using images plucked from his domestic life as a departure point for paint ings that he has constructed as singular images rather than a collage of many. One work, titled The Puzzle, shows two figures seated at a table assembling jigsaw pieces that resemble a Mindscapes painting, cleverly alluding to his old mode of picture-making. For McGinness, addressing the picture plane as a cohesive space feels like a breakthrough—and serves as something of a “welcome mat” to viewers.

What has remained unchanged is his signature drawing process, with its roots in his longtime interest in graphic design. Growing up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he was born in 1972, McGinness kept journals of his drawings. He also made his own toys, with help from his mother, who was an avid crafts woman. When McGinness became part of a teenage band, his true talents shone in his designs for the band’s paraphernalia, like posters, T-shirts, and album covers. He recognized the power of good logos early on.

“I couldn’t afford the cool surf-shop shirts, so I made my own,” said McGinness, whose interest in branding and mass production led him to

6 study graphic design, in parallel with fine art, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. A Warhol enthusiast since high school, McGinness interned at the then-nascent Andy Warhol Museum while he was in college, helping with the museum’s signage and letterhead. He designed an invitation for the museum’s opening, which took place the same week in 1994 that McGinness graduated from Carnegie Mellon and moved to New York with his girlfriend (now wife), Trish Goodwin.

In what he refers to today as his “act one,” McGinness began working with clip art found in the public domain, projecting and painting those simple, graphic forms onto materials like velvet and AstroTurf. “I wanted to take these anon ymously created images and put them in a fine art context,” said McGinness of the work he made through the 1990s. “I’m still interested in using that seemingly anonymous form of communication. My drawings look like they should live on signs that aren’t authored.”

His sequential drawing process, which continues to the present, developed as he began exhibiting in 2000. He starts with a very rough sketch of an image from life or from a dream, such as a figure with reindeer antlers riding a porpoise. McGinness will then refine (and refine some more), abstracting

Designing Destiny, 1000 piece puzzle, 25 x 25 inches, 63.5 x 63.5cm, published by Four Point Puzzles

and simplifying to find the underlying geometry. After that, he scans the end result onto a computer and cleans it up into a crisp silhouette that reads as a symbol or icon, legible and often absurd.

Over the past two decades, McGinness has amassed thousands of these pictographic drawings, inventoried by categories such as women, hands, flowers, couples, studio tools, art historical appropriations, and fleur-de-lis swirls. He thinks of them as elements on a periodic table, available to be reproduced and layered in infinite combinations on the silkscreen paint ings he began to make in 2002. He appropriated this process, which is used in commercial reproduction and was masterfully adapted by Warhol, to make his unabashedly beautiful and seductive canvases filled with ara besque flourishes.

“These fleur-de-lis swirls for me have always been symbols for fanciness or wealth,” said McGinness, who was interested in “making luxury goods out of these luxury forms.”

In his longtime Mindscapes series, which he calls his “act two,” McGinness accumulated his elements into great waves or wreaths or allover pattern and decoration on his vibrant canvases. The concrete outlines and specific meanings of each symbol melt into aesthetics—composition, form, and color. The puzzle pieces don’t form a coherent picture. Any implied narrative is nonlinear—for the viewer to project, like a Rorschach test. “That’s how the mind works,” McGinness said. “It’s random access memories.”

McGinness brought many of the ideas in his Mindscapes to a culmination in his first exhibition with the Miles McEnery Gallery in 2020. He conceived the show as a painting of paintings—with 72 individual canvases in nine sizes abutting to form one wraparound mural, measuring 6 feet by 127 feet on three sides of the gallery. Filled with fanciful symbols that are spiraling, coalescing and bleeding across this running strip, the painting could be broken up and sold in parts, mixed and matched in pairings and triptychs. It exploited the tension between micro and macro worlds that is always at play in his work. Covertly self-referential—the 6-foot height of the mural corresponds to the artist’s stature and the 72 canvases correspond to the year of his birth—it was another brain-teaser of a puzzle.

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While he adamantly defied a single vantage point in his previous show, McGinness first explored creating a unified illusionistic space in his series Studio Views shown in 2017 at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. These interiors each presented McGinness paintings propped against the wall on buckets, resting on the wood-grain floor of his studio. “It’s a scene—they’re kind of self-portraits in the tradition of artists who’ve painted studio views,” said McGinness, of these important precursors to how he’s now approaching pictorial space.

In New Narratives, McGinness has taken on the challenges of traditional painting genres—landscape, figure, still life—albeit in a way that remains entirely on-brand for the artist. Perception Management (2020), anchoring one wall in the exhibition, still has a cacophony of individual icons, looping and layered edge to edge. But its decorative flatness is undercut by a daz zling river of blue metal leaf snaking across the picture plane and creating the sense of a landscape from a bird’s-eye view. McGinness looked to Japanese landscape painting as a reference in this and its sibling painting, Pedaling in Sauerkraut (2020), which has a sumptuous pink current of metal leaf running through it. Mindscapes, 2020, installation view, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

Another transitional painting in the show is the large-scale triptych titled The Last Rights Game, which was finished this year. Outlines of large-scale figures seem to project forward and vibrate from a background of densely silkscreened symbols across the 7-by-15-foot painting. McGinness based these figure drawings on quintessential types lifted from stock photography: the sad sack who has been fired and is carrying a box of his personal effects from his cubicle, the seductress emerging from the shower with her hair wrapped in a towel, the apish business guy hitting the jackpot at his computer.

Any imagined narrative to the lineup feels dreamlike, and indeed the title of the painting came to McGinness in a dream about convicted criminals on death row being given one last baseball game to play before execution. All are cultural characters that McGinness was attracted to and that presented interesting drawing challenges. Typically, his icons have emphasized shape and form, not lines. Here, he approached the figures more as cartoons, looking to examples of portraits with bold, graphic black outlines by Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse as inspiration. The lessons learned from the making of such figures helped prepare him for what he’s calling his “act three.”

Not a Through Street, 2016, acrylic on linen, diptych, 84 x 120 inches, 213.4 x 304.8 cm

In a dramatic shift in the way he pieces together his paintings, McGinness is now using a single drawing as the skeleton or lattice for an entire canvas. And rather than mine the cultural and public domain for the source material to make these individual images, he’s finding his content right at home. “I was just drawing what was around me,” said McGinness. “It didn’t even occur to me that some of these paintings are my most personal pictures.”

The gateway was a series of “Mother and Child” drawings McGinness began several years ago, including one based on a snapshot of his wife sitting in a mod Eero Aarnio-designed Ball Chair with their two daughters, Evelyn and Maxine. In McGinness’s simplified version, the central maternal form enfolds a child’s silhouette under each arm, all ensconced within the egg-like shape. It’s a new look at the age-old trope of Madonna and Child—an updated icon.

This image, silkscreened in fluorescent colors, now holds the entire 7-by-5-foot canvas, so it is slightly larger than life. Its buzzy energy spirals outward from the circular motif, framed by a background of shelves and books and woodgrain flooring. It provides a window onto a world of domesticity.

Left: Source snapshot for Mother and Child Painting, 2018 Right: Source snapshot for HighBräu, 2020

“I’m really interested in making singular narrative pictures now—addressing the picture plane as the symbol space,” said McGinness, “as opposed to making a lot of individual drawings and collaging those together, and the resulting composition is almost incidental.”

Yet McGinness still couldn’t resist his innate impulse toward fragmentation in the making of these new paintings. Each started with a full-scale drawing broken into many pieces—not only the line segments that outline the forms but all the shapes within. Using more than 300 individual screens created from these parts, he squeegeed the paint onto canvas to recompose the image. He laid down certain outlines repeatedly and in purposeful misregistration to achieve a visual vibration. “We’ve never had so many screens in play at once,” said McGinness, who embraced the challenge of constructing his puzzles in a new order. “The process is all about turning the picture into a painting.”

If the motif of mother and child embodies a certain universality, others have their origins in activities very specific to the McGinness household. HighBräu references the pastime of brewing beer, something McGinness and his wife

Left: Source snapshot for The Spaghetti Eater, 2018 Right: Sketch Process for The Spaghetti Eater, 2019, ink on paper

While McGinness ultimately abandoned the impractical concept, the story of “HighBräu” is commemorated on canvas. An image of Evelyn and Maxine on bottling day, pared down to generic figures connected by the exaggerated

Sketch Process for The Spaghetti Eater, 2019 – 2021, ink on paper

circuitry of a tube stretching from carboy to bucket, serves as the foundation. The “HighBräu” logo, repeated on a diagonal like a wallpaper pattern, forms the background in two tones of green metal leaf. Some of what McGinness calls “#metadata,” information from his branding and marketing plan, found its way to the margins along the sides of the painting. The artist couldn’t help but do a little collaging.

His younger daughter, Maxine, reappears in three other paintings including Girl with Guitar, The Cat and the Devil, and The Spaghetti Eater. In the latter, an image of the rambunctious little girl is transformed through McGinness’s drawing process into a highly abstract and amusingly mechanical-looking crea ture, evocative of Picasso’s surrealist figures set on a beach. Her upside-down head, with pieces of hair falling downward, is reduced to an elongated neck and a wide-open mouth receiving spaghetti from a giant arcing arm grasping a fork that dangles the strands of gold-leafed pasta.

Forms echo like a stream of consciousness from one painting to the next. The serpentine tangle of snakes erupting from the head of Medusa, modeled

Final Drawing for The Spaghetti Eater, 2021, digital vector file

directly from a drawing of the mythological character that McGinness uncov ered in one of his childhood journals, reverberates with the sinuous leaves of three potted snake plants in the background of Girl with Guitar. The plants, in turn, become the isolated focus in a couple of still lifes. “Formally, they’re like portraits,” says McGinness, who has plants throughout his home and whose mother was a master gardener. “The leaves are another opportunity for me to exploit the process of mixing the paint on the screen.”

The artist maintains that these New Narratives are not portraits of his family. “Even the ‘Mother and Child,’ they don’t have faces,” he said. “They’re very generic and certainly symbolic, like the work has always been. It’s almost like stock drawings of personal things.”

Yet at this mid-career juncture, these pictures are undeniably generated by things close to his heart. For an artist who has long explored visual corollar ies for various forms of consciousness, these new scenes are still a bit of a mystery for him. “Even to me, it’s a little bewildering,” says McGinness. “But I’m so enamored by the process.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a Brooklyn-based journalist who contributes frequently to The New York Times and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. She previously wrote on McGinness’s work for ARTnews in the April 2007 cover story titled “The New Abstraction.”

Hyperkulturemia, 2021

Acrylic and metal leaf on canvas 72 inches, diameter 182.9 cm, diameter

Making Ends Meet, 2021 x 106.7

Potted Plant Portrait

Potted Plant Portrait (Rana)

RYAN McGINNESS

Born in Virginia Beach, VA in 1972 Lives and works in New York, NY

EDUCATION

1994

BFA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

1990–1994

Curatorial Assistant, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2022

“New Narratives,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “kraftworks,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2020

“Pedaling in Sauerkraut,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Mindscapes,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2019

“Warhol Flower Icons,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO “Mother & Child,” Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY

2018

“Warhol Flower Icons,” AishoNanzuka, Hong Kong, China “Warhol Flower Icons,” EchoOne Nanzuka, Bangkok, Thailand

2017

“Studio Views,” Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI

“Ocular Evidence,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA

2016

“#metadata,” Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2015

“Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit,” Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA

2014

“Community Identity Stability,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Figure Drawings,” Pace Prints, New York, NY “Everything Is Everywhere,” Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“Art History Is Not Linear (Boijmans),” Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2013

“Women & Mindscapes,” Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland

2012

“Women: New (Re)Presentations,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA

“Women: Sun-Stained Symbols,” Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, NY “Units of Meaning,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

“Women: Sketches & Solutions,” Gering & López Gallery, New York, NY

“Geometric Primitives,” Pace Primitive, New York, NY

2011

“Trophies,” Prism Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Works on Paper,” Country Club, Los Angeles, CA

“Recent Paintings,” Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Color Oblicuo,” Espai Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona, Spain

“Black Holes,” Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, NY

2010

“New Tondos,” Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland “Studio Franchise,” La Casa Encendida Museum, Madrid, Spain

2009

“Ryan McGinness: Works.,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY “Mindscapes & Black Holes,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2008

“Ryan McGinness: Aesthetic Comfort,” Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH

“A Shadow Feeling of Loss,” Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi and Co., Milan, Italy

“Have You Seen Him?,” MoMA PS1, New York, NY

2007

“Varied Editions,” Pace Prints, New York, NY

“A Rich Fantasy Life,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA

2006

“Never Odd Or Even,” Galería Moriarty, Madrid, Spain

“Never Odd Or Even,” Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“Never Odd Or Even,” Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi and Co., Milan, Italy

“Gas, Grass, or Ass (Nobody Rides for Free),” Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, NY

“Mildly Subversive,” Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, MA

2005

“Installationview,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY

“The Burden of Keeping it Real,” André Simoens Gallery, Knokke-Zoute, Belgium

“Pain-Free Kittens,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA

2004

“Multiverse,” Galerie du jour agnès b., Paris, France

“Living Signs,” Galería Moriarty, Madrid, Spain

2003

“Worlds within Worlds,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY

“Sponsorship,” Black Market Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2002

“This Dream Is So Life-Like,” Gas Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Products Are The New Art,” Printed Matter, New York, NY

“Dream Garden” (with Julia Chiang), Deitch Projects, New York, NY

2001

“Evolution Is the Theory of Everything,” Parco Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

“Sign Age,” Galerie de Miguel, Munich, Germany

“Pieceofmind,” Colette, Paris, France

2000

“Shtick,” Houston Gallery, Seattle, WA

“Luxurygood,” Alife, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2021

“Dust to Dust.,” The Museum Of__, Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA

“Abstraction/Simulation,” El Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Aínsa-Sobrarbe, Huesca, Spain

2020

“Really.” (curated by Inka Essenhigh & Ryan McGinness), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

“Artists for New York,” Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY

2018

“Grafik” (curated by Ryan McGinness), Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY

“Heads Roll” (curated by Paul Morrison), Graves Gallery, Sheffield, United Kingdom

“Tick Tock: Time in Contemporary Art,” Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY

2017

“Drawing: The Beginning of Everything,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

2016

“Library Street Collective Presents,” Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI

2015

“A Perspective on Agnès B.’s Collection,” Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, Lille, France

“Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Paintings,” Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH

2014

“Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting,” McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX

2012

“Factory Direct,” The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

“Modern and Contemporary Art from Private Collections,” Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

2011

“Masters of Reality,” Gering & López Gallery, New York, NY

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“Nose Job” (curated by Carlo McCormick), Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

“Litos Grafera,” Art Centre Silkeborg Bad, Silkeborg, Denmark

“Litos Grafera,” Museum of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

2010

“Contemporary Magic” (curated by Stacy Engman), National Arts Club, New York, NY

2008

“Royal Academy Illustrated 2008: A Selection from the 240th Summer Exhibition,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom

2007

“Monumental Drawing,” Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, TX

2006

“Graphic Content,” Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH

“Art on Paper 2006,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC

“The World Is Round,” Public Art Fund, MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY

“USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Collection,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom

“Spank the Monkey,” Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom

“Since 2000: Printmaking Now,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

“The Garden Party,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY

2005

“Greater New York 2005,” MoMA PS1, New York, NY

2004

“Will Boys Be Boys? Questioning Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art” (organized by Independent Curators International and curated by Shamim Momin), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, traveled to Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo, FL; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO, and Salina Art Center, Salina, KS

“The Dreamland Artists Club” (presented by Creative Time), Coney Island, New York, NY

“Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture” (curated by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, traveled to La Casa Encendida Museum, Madrid, Spain; Arhus Kunstbygning, Aarhus, Denmark; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; Le Tri Postal, Lille, France; Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan, Italy; USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA

“La Collection d’Art Contemporain d’Agnès B.,” Les Abattoirs Museum, Toulouse, France

“Earthly Delights” (curated by Lisa Tung), Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA

2003

“A New New York Scene,” Galerie du Jour, Paris, France “Lead Poisoning,” New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA

“North Star Video Screening,” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

2002

“SK8 on The Wall,” Gallery Rocket, Tokyo, Japan “Session The Bowl,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY

2001

“Spunky,” Exit Art, New York, NY

2000

“Critic as Grist” (curated by Michael Portnoy), White Box, New York, NY

“Insights: Interior Spaces in Contemporary Art,” Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Stamford, CT

SELECT COLLECTIONS

AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Bank of America, New York, NY

Charles Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom

Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH

Cora Diamond Corporation, New York, NY

Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI

Gilberto and Rosa Sandretto Collection, Milan, Italy

Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO

JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY

The Judy & Rob Mann Collection, New York, NY

Malingue Collection, Paris, France

Matthew and Iris Strauss Family Foundation, San Diego, CA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Michael Krichman and Carmen Cuenca Collection, San Diego, CA MTV Networks, New York, NY

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Neuberger Berman Collection, New York, NY New York Public Library, New York, NY

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, San Francisco, CA

Peter Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA

Phillip Schrager Collection of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE

Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

Richard E. Jacobs Group Collection, Westlake, OH

Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland Schwab Family Collection, San Francisco, CA

Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan

UBS Art Collection, New York, NY

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

RYAN McGINNESS

NEW NARRATIVES

20 October – 26 November 2022

Miles McEnery Gallery 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery

All rights reserved Essay © 2022 Hilarie M. Sheets

Director of Exhibitions Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY

Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Farzad Owrang, New York, NY

Color separations by Echelon, Los Angeles, CA

Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY

Ryan McGinness Studios, Inc.: Gina Kim, Brendan McGovern, Julia Brodatska, John Ocasio, and Evelyn & Maxine McGinness

ISBN: 978-1-949327-88-5

Front cover: The Cat and the Devil (detail), 2022 Back cover: The Puzzle (detail), 2022 Endsheets: Process sketches for New Narratives, 2019 – 2021

Many of the pigments used in the paintings repro duced in this book reflect different sections of the light spectrum based on their physical properties. These unique attributes are further amplified with the artist’s layering techniques. Therefore, in-person observation of the artworks is required for full appreciation. While it is obviously next to impossible to achieve by machine offset printing in four process inks the exact effects of these paints, the greatest possible care was taken to prevent loss of value and detail.