Sunday, February 17, 2008

Mark Ryden





In my opinion Mark Ryden is an american artist that has no equal. He stands alone in vision and content. Since his debut exhibit "The Meat Show" in california in 1998, there's been many artist that have cropped up producing work that look suspiciously similar to Rydens. Knock-offs. They've just replaced Rydens iconic constances,... meat, numbers, catholicism, grotesque fictional animals and little girls and boys, with their own symbols seemingly pulled out of a hat,.. with no rich dualities and simple horrors that are a constant in Rydens work.

His 2007 debut of his exhibit "The Tree Show" was as I remember, accepted as masterpiece. I read The Los Angeles Museum Of Modern Art purchased a Ryden piece for 800k before they had seen any of the new exhibit. Quoi? They can and do anything they want in LA that's why the LA art scene is the LA art scene I guess. "The wonder that is a constant in the content of his newer "Tree Show" pieces, was possibly upstaged by his vastly improved technical skills." -BLENDER. His work was thought to have been much improved technically, and he was noticed then by galleries from New York to Europe.

There are tiny swirls of horror, innocence, and disturbing curiosities in every corner of his pieces. His web site MarkRyden.com (I urge you to visit) has a partial collection of his works but you can find much more by just surfing the www. Everyone writes about him, he's talked about in pop-culture circles daily, and there are a million blog posts about Mark Ryden, mine is just one of a million more to come.

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