Details:
① Artwork:
Young Musician
Built through flat planes of color, this oil painting depicts the artist’s daughter learning the guitar. The picture references an instrument often and famously portrayed in early Modernist artworks, particularly The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso from his Blue Period. Here, Steadman uses the same melancholy blue and ochre colors as Picasso’s famous composition. But, unlike Picasso's expression of despair, Steadman's painting honors youthful exuberance while also lamenting the fleeting nature of such moments. The painting’s layout also playfully evokes one of pop music’s most iconic moments, John Lennon’s Bed-In for Peace.
Painting in a flat, economical style, Ryan Steadman pares down his biographical images to their most essential yet idealized shapes. With subjects decidedly gentle in nature, he eschews the more traditional and aggressively masculine artistic preoccupations of heroic abstraction or the female nude to focus on the intimacies of a life lived in the county among children, landscapes, horses, cats, and his partner. Steadman exalts cherished daily activities, such as hiking, foraging, or playing an instrument, to manifest their profound meaning and beauty. By revering his most tangible and vital relationships, Steadman hopes to pinpoint his fleeting reality before it vanishes.
Specs:
③ Artist:
For Steadman, themes centered around bonded relationships and the home have become all-encompassing subject matter for his oil paintings. Biographical and in startling yet harmonious color, Steadman’s paintings are equally steeped in the traditions of both color-field abstraction and figurative realism. With subjects decidedly gentle in nature, he eschews the more traditional and aggressively masculine artistic preoccupations of heroic abstraction or the female nude. Instead, this group of intimate artworks focuses on a life lived in the county among children, horses, dogs, cats, and his partner. With his flat, economical painting style, Steadman pares down his images to their most essential yet idealized shapes. Through this timeless aesthetic, he exalts cherished quotidian activities, such as hiking, foraging, or playing an instrument, to manifest their profound meaning and beauty. In an increasingly technological world where the real and artificial have rapidly become entwined, Steadman creates paintings that revere his most tangible and vital relationships as he attempts to pinpoint his fleeting reality before it’s gone.
Ryan Steadman was born in 1974 in Greenville, SC, and lives in Delhi, NY. He earned his BFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
He has mounted solo and two-person exhibitions at Halsey McKay Gallery in New York City & East Hampton, NY; Wilder Gallery in London, GB; Europa Gallery in New York City, NY; Pablo’s Birthday in New York City, NY; and Karma in New York City, NY.
He has participated in group exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York, NY; Vardan Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY; The Boston University Gallery in Boston, MA; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York City, NY; and others.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, The East Hampton Star, Artslant.com, Artinfo.com, Modern Painters Magazine, Time Out New York, Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings, and elsewhere.
