Emma Amos: Self-Portraits @ Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth @ Frieze London

Emma Amos: Self-Portraits

Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth @ Frieze London

October 12 – 16, 2022

EMMA AMOS

Work Suit, 1994

© Estate of Emma Amos, courtesy RYAN LEE

RYAN LEE presents Emma Amos: Self Portraits, a selection of landmark paintings by the pioneering artist and activist EMMA AMOS (b. 1937—d. 2020). A celebrated artist, Amos was known for her experimentation in both subject matter and material throughout her work. She was an original Guerilla Girl and the only female member of the influential African American artist group Spiral, alongside Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. Emma Amos, whose work ranged from graphic, to expressionist, to figurative, has always understood that, as she put it, “to put brush to canvas as a black artist was a political act.”

A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, Emma Amos’s commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. In each painting presented in RYAN LEE’s booth, Emma Amos uses her own likeness to demonstrate her longstanding interest in making art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. Spanning three decades, these works place Amos’s body hurtling through space, donning a likeness of Lucian Freud’s wrinkled white body, clothed in her own hand-woven cloth, mourning a friend, and overlaid with photo transfer images of enslaved children. These works are simultaneously defiant and radiating with anxiety at the black woman artist’s tenuous position in society. Throughout her oeuvre, Emma Amos intentionally painted her figures in a range of skin tones in order to combat the reductive notion of blackness being propagated by a white male-dominated New York art world.

According to critic bell hooks, Emma Amos “moves into history, becoming at each stage of her life artist, subject, more and more a woman of power, decolonized in that no group of people determines and contains her will to paint, to represent. That’s why there’s such a sense of history being made visible in her work.”

Born in Georgia, Emma Amos spent most of her life and career in New York City. In 1959, she was introduced to the vivid gestural lines of Abstract Expressionism while studying at London’s Central School of Art, this early influence remained with the artist throughout her entire career. Further, she had a background in weaving and textile design, and often included fabric elements in her work. The sumptuous and colorful African cloth both grounds the images and reestablishes a connection to one aspect of Emma Amos’s cultural roots.

This is both RYAN LEE Gallery and Emma Amos’s debut exhibition at Frieze London. The landmark paintings on view in the gallery’s booth have never been exhibited anywhere in Europe before. Emma Amos’s works were recently on view in a major retrospective organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, which traveled to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late 2021. The retrospective was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Lisa Farrington, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Laurel Garber, Kay Walkingstick, and Phoebe Wolfskill. Emma Amos’s work was first shown in London in the important exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern. 

Emma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta, GA - d. 2020 Bedford, NH) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist. A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, her commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights movement and feminism, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism in her art. “It’s always been my contention,” Amos once said, “that for me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.”

An artist known for pushing technical and thematic boundaries, Emma Amos unabashedly made art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. She was profoundly influenced by the civil rights and black movements that pushed for recognition in the art world. Amos became a member of Spiral, an important African American collective in 1964 and joined various underground feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993, and the trailblazing Guerilla Girls group after its founding in 1985. Emma Amos’s vivid and powerful paintings are frequently a celebration of the black body, consistently reminding the viewer, the critic and the art world at large of the undeniably important presence of the black and female body that has so often been overlooked.

Emma Amos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and the Central School of Art in London in 1960. She subsequently moved to New York and became active in the downtown arts scene, working alongside prominent Spiral artists such as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Alvin Hollingsworth and Charles Alston. In 1965, she earned her Masters in Arts from New York University and taught art at the Dalton School in New York. She is a former Professor and Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University where she taught for 28 years.

In 2016, Emma Amos received Georgia Museum of Art’s Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson award and was honored by the Studio Museum in Harlem as an Icon and Trailblazer, along with Faith Ringgold and Lorraine O’Grady.

Emma Amos’ paintings have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019); and the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017). In 2021, the Georgia Museum of Art organized the landmark retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York. This year, Emma Amos is included in Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Out on the Streets: Modern Life and Diversity in US Art (1893-1976) at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

Her work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Birmingham Museum of Art; British Museum, London; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art; James F. Byrnes Institute, Stuttgart, Germany; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Newark Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.

RYAN LEE Gallery represents Emma Amos since 2016.

RYAN LEE GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

ryanleegallery.com

Updated 20/10/2022

Gideon Rubin @ Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC - The Sun Also Rises

Gideon Rubin: The Sun Also Rises 

Ryan Lee Gallery, New York 

November 11 – December 22, 2021 

Ryan Lee presents The Sun Also Rises, the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the London-based painter, GIDEON RUBIN. Rubin is known for painting faceless figures and ambiguous landscapes that are familiar yet fugitive. Using vintage and found photographs as the basis for his paintings, Gideon Rubin reimagines the context surrounding these memory fragments, drawing the viewer into recognizable scenes that refuse resolution and leave the narrative and its protagonists deliberately nebulous. Through the application and erasure of paint, Gideon Rubin says, “details are lost, but a new identity appears.”

Gideon Rubin considers himself a portrait painter, but his paintings are less about an individual sitter than his perception of the world. He turns his attention to pops of strategically placed color and points of contact: “I focus on the edges, where colors, shapes and tones touch each other,” he says. In works such as Blue Jeans (2021) and White Shirt (2021) Gideon Rubin’s lone figures seem lost in moments of contemplation, but the absence of facial features obscures access to definitive meaning. Rubin confesses that he enjoys cultivating this deliberate incompleteness; the resulting images are painterly snapshots of moments in time that appear both commonplace and particular.

All of the paintings in The Sun Also Rises were produced during the height of the pandemic in London, and the landscape images in particular provided Gideon Rubin with “a comforting sense of escapism,” he said. In Boat (2020) and Untitled (2021) Gideon Rubin’s solitary figures seem to stare out at the nature that surrounds them—the blue of a body of water, and wild forest greenery, respectively. Though each of these landscapes is abstracted—into loose layers of blue and energetic bursts of green—and neither reveals itself as a specific location, they are meditations on the role of place in Gideon Rubin’s own practice. “Over the past year or two, we all had to reflect on our relationship towards our environment – the landscape, or lack thereof. This relationship, between experience and the memory of it, between painting a boat and going out on a boat, became the backdrop to a very productive artistic isolation.”

GIDEON RUBIN 

Gideon Rubin (b. 1973 in Tel Aviv, Israel) frequently deals with the subjects of memory, history and identity - each painting is a fragment of a larger story, a moment in time. Working from photographic source material, Gideon Rubin voraciously hunts for old film stills and vintage photographs, scavenging for images on the Internet for each new work.

Gideon Rubin studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York before getting his M.F.A. from University College London - Slade School of Fine Art. He lives and works in London.

His work has most recently been the subject of important solo exhibitions at the Rubin Museum (2020), the Freud Museum, London (2018), the Chengdu MoCA (2016), the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2015), among others.

Gideon Rubin is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including the Collezione Fondazione San Patrignano, IT; Fondation Frances, Senile, FR; Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Herzliya, IL; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museum Voorlinden Collection, NL; Rubin Museum, IL; Ruinart Collection, Reims, FR; The Seavest Collection, New York, NY; Sender Collection, DE; the Speyer Family Collection, New York, NY and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK.

RYAN LEE GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

ryanleegallery.com

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Donald Sultan @ Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC - Mimosa, Paintings and Drawings

Donald Sultan: 

Mimosa, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
Ryan Lee Gallery, New York
Through May 11, 2019

RYAN LEE presents Donald Sultan: Mimosa, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS, an exhibition of new work by the acclaimed artist. Inspired by a gift of mimosa blossoms he received from a friend in the South of France, Sultan began using the structure of the mimosa plant to continue his interrogation of the space between abstraction and representation, the organic and the industrial, as well as the history of modern art. The exhibition includes largescale drawings and monumental paintings, ranging from four to eight feet wide, respectively. This is the first exhibition of Donald Sultan’s Mimosa paintings and the show is accompanied by a catalogue.

Donald Sultan executed the paintings and drawings simultaneously, and as a result they inform each other. Working out the density of charcoal and conte in the drawings first led Sultan to the paintings in which he uses roofing tar and enamel to create a richly textured surface. He continues his use of industrial materials, such as Masonite and vinyl along with the tar and enamel, to construct his paintings, which in their scale, heft, and dimensionality, are sculptural as well as architectural. Their exposed sides and edges reveal the process of their creation. Unlike prior series in which Donald Sultan carved directly into the surface of the painting to generate his imagery, in the Mimosas he builds up the surface through a series of layering techniques applied directly to the Masonite.

In Mimosa Jan 16 2019, a cascade of black and brown leaves washes across the eight-by- eightfoot Masonite surface. The range in depth and luminosity of the dark palette is the result of washing the tar with turpentine after its application—a technique Sultan borrowed from his groundbreaking Disaster paintings of the 1980s. Combining fluid gestural brushwork with the precision of stencils and decals, Donald Sultan creates a composition that is at once explosive and contained.

Color plays an especially prominent role in these new works as exemplified by the lush green foliage in Mimosa With Orange and Green Oct 3 2018. In other paintings, passages of light blue suggest the sundrenched skies of Southern France, and Donald Sultan’s mimosa blossoms range in color from dark blue, to orange, deep green, and indigo.

The circular forms that Sultan makes use of visualize the interconnectedness across the organic and artificial realms, and link this new body of work to prior series, such as the Morning Glories, Buttons, and Dominoes of the 1990s. The flattened discs have served as the center of a flower, the holes in a button, or in the case of the Mimosas, an entire blossom. Donald Sultan has said, “the closer you work from reality the more abstract things can get.” In distilling the mimosa plant into the fundamental geometry of its leaves and blossoms, it becomes something conceptual. It functions as a vehicle for the exploration of visual ideas—the “armature,” as Sultan has called it, for a “gestural thought of leaves in general.”

DONALD SULTAN (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an internationally recognized artist best known for elevating the still life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms as well as his use of industrial materials. He studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, and his first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Sultan lives and works in New York City.

RYAN LEE GALLERY
515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
ryanleegallery.com