Stalker, 2004 24" x 48" mixed media on panel

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition for the artist Michael Ryan. Show dates are April 7 - June 4, 2005. This marks the artist's third exhibition with the gallery. Catalogs will be available.

Though Ryan did receive some training in the science of marbleizing, he is a self-taught artist who only began painting in 1987, at the age of thirty-seven. He approaches his work like an alchemist, combining an unusual mixture of oils, pastels, epoxies and powdered pigments to build up richly textured, somber surfaces that glow with an otherworldly luminosity. Ryan's brushwork functions less to represent than to conjure.

Michael Ryan's ominous landscapes are often inhabited by uncanny, hovering presences - an array of goblins, demons or composite spirit animals that are mythic and archetypal in nature. These hybrid creatures can be seen as guardian figures, gatekeepers that patrol and mediate the borderland between our own timespace and the eternal.