edited by tobia piatto (tobia.piatto@positive-magazine.com)
Team (gallery, inc.) will present a solo show of new work by American artist Ryan McGinley as our entry at the second annual edition of FRIEZE NEW YORK. The city’s premiere fair of contemporary art will run from 10 through 13 May 2013 on Randall’s Island. Team will be located at stand number C4.
McGinley will be represented here by ten large-scale photographs produced during the summer and fall of 2012, and the winter of 2013, at a variety of locations in the United States. The photographs record quite elaborate situations that have been orchestrated by McGinley and a traveling troupe of models and assistants. The logistical details of the shoots can oftentimes resemble those of a motion picture and this seems fitting to these broad pictures that communicate on a cinematic scale – as though an entire feature film had somehow been compressed into a single image.
The rigorous construction of the fictive, nature/culture-space in which McGinley’s models are photographed contrasts with the spontaneity of movement, accident and, sometimes, ethereal effects. In the midst of these composed scenes, McGinley enlists happenstance in the “rendering” of his images, aided by fall mats, fireworks, light leaks, early morning fog and frost.
McGinley’s images crystallize our saturated, over-mediated moment while appearing to court the timelessness of painting’s history. Particularly in these larger photographs, a greater and greater amount of attention is paid to the image surfaces during the post-production phase. Through the meticulous application of grain layers and the manipulation of color, the artist creates an almost painterly effect in the finished photographs.
At the intersection of advertising, editorial photography, travel and landscape, social networking and youth culture, sits McGinley’s current production. His photographs are influenced by the miasma of genre imagery that we negotiate daily while, in turn, profoundly influencing the look of contemporary popular culture. In this sense, the creation and dissemination of his photographs on an incredibly wide global stage, is almost immediate. As John Kelsey writes in his 2012 essay, “In these images, social and geographical dispersion/connection is visualized as smooth, tattooed, naked life on the run. Here, as in a dream, running is strange… closer to flying: bodies appear buoyant, as if in a state of suspended animation.”
Ryan McGinley has shown his work extensively over the past ten years. Solo shows include The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, MUSAC in Léon, Spain, and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. Group appearances include the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoCA in Los Angeles, The Brooklyn Museum, Washington’s National Portrait Gallery, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and the MACRO in Rome. McGinley first appeared in a group exhibition at Team in 2003. His first solo under the gallery’s auspices was held at London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2006.
