Kathleen Marie Ryan’s paintings provide our street weary eyes with a soothing respite, this is a visual escape from a cluttered world
Α world where art has replaced beauty with statements. Kathleen Marie Ryan expresses her world in colors, shapes and patterns that challenge the borders of the canvas, just as a majestic view in nature bleeds past our peripheral vision. It is as if her eyes are showing us how to see past the unpleasant details of a world.
The Platonic view of beauty is that it is an abstract, perfect, immutable concept that transcends time and space and that to encounter it reminds human souls of their mystery. So it is not surprising that when we gaze up at these paintings, they take us to a place that our own eyes seem to recall. A place where we enjoyed a solitude, which required no statements, no explanations.
Kathleen Marie Ryan, like any good artist takes us on a journey, where she provides a way of viewing the objective world through her subjective lens. And hers is not the current world’s idea of subjectivity. It does not climb down into the alienation or oppression seemingly imposed by a complicated society, a toil that may also eschew beauty.
Hers is a view that has been strongly influenced by the contemporary American artists, who starting in the late 40’s, pioneered freedom of expression and form.
At the same time, she seeks what the great artists down through millennia have sought…a picture, a poem, a symphony, an aria that elevates us above the temporal.
Perhaps, it is the metaphysical aspect of this painter that stands apart from an increasingly de-sacralized world. It is her inner sense of belonging to something bigger and more majestic that allows her to see the world and express a vision that leaves behind the profane.
It is a light that is not bent by the gravitational pull of social messaging or commercial applause.
It is a light that is not bent by the gravitational pull of social messaging or commercial applause.
Kathleen Marie Ryan was chosen to be in the group show “Elemental Abstraction” at the Downing Yudain Gallery in Stamford CT and The Bruce Museum auction through Downing Yudain Gallery and the MVVO AD art show in both 2021 and 2022, vetted by Eric Shiner, former director of The Andy Warhol Museum, Jose Diaz, Chief Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum, and Laura Skoler, Board of Directors, New Museum, NYC. A selection of her artworks are currently on display at the Dakota Jackson Showroom in New York City.