David Ryan

Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents "Object > Path > Outline Stroke," a solo exhibition in the Project Room of sculptural paintings by Las Vegas-based artist, David Ryan. While object-like in physicality, Ryan's works soften the distinction between the architectural, geographic, biomorphic, and abstract. In distorting the viewer's perception of depth, plane, and contour, Ryan creates ambiguous, but alluring compositions that engage with both quirky artifice and aesthetic formality.

"Object > Path > Outline Stroke" will feature several new works, as well as a progressive development in Ryan's overall practice. While still absorbed with the slick perfection of finish fetish, and procedural focus of hard edge abstraction, Ryan now also incorporates purposeful imperfections that animate his interest in organic form. Meticulously exact profiles are now wed with seemingly imprecise grooves, outlines, and crevices – paying homage to the spontaneity and uninhibited development intrinsic to creative process. His work explores the dynamic between craft and mass production, art and design, man and machine on an increasingly astute level, as evidence of the artist's own mortality is left permanently rendered on his bold terrains. An optical conundrum that echoes Robert Therrien's suggestively consumer-based forms and Ellsworth Kelly's willfully reductive abstraction, Ryan's work is an enchanting study in phenomenology as well as the collective unconscious.

Ryan (b. 1971, TX) received his BFA from the University of Texas in Austin, TX before making the move to earn his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (NV) where he studied under Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin. His work has been exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Las Vegas Art Museum (NV), Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard (Paris), Seomi & Tuus (Seoul), Davidson Contemporary (NY), and James Kelly Contemporary (NM). David Ryan lives and works in Las Vegas.