Ryan Mrozowski »Untitled (Field)«

Focus, April 14, 2022 - April 28, 2022

Mrozowski is perhaps best known for his serial paintings and oil stick drawings of flora and fauna motifs. He sources unremarkable and ubiquitous images of orange trees, berry bushes, parrots, dogs and garden-variety birds from magazines and books, then complicates the initial reading of the archetypal forms using pattern and repetition to disrupt pictorial space.

 His approach is witty, closely linked to linguistics and word games like tongue-twisters, palindromes and spoonerisms. Like a painterly George Perec he uses classification and play within the set constrains of his motif series. Working with binary oppositions like background and foreground, flatness and depth, presence and absence, the flat plane of the linen becomes a stage for his taxonomy of forms.  

Ryan Mrozowski was born in Indiana, PA, in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005, and his BFA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Mrozowski has held exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York (2019), Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2017), Arcade Gallery, London (2016), On Stellar Rays, New York (2015), Art in General, Vilnius (2014), Pierogi, Brooklyn (2012, 2010) and the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles (2008). His works have been included in group exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2018), Pratt Institute, New York (2017), Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2016), Salon 94, New York, and Marianne Boesky, New York (both 2015), Chapter, New York (2014), and The Kitchen, New York (2011). Mrozowski also had a solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin in 2018 and at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm in 2020.