Mary Ryan Gallery

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Guerrilla Girls Vintage Posters: 1985-1994, consisting of 28 vintage posters created by the feminist activist group the Guerrilla Girls. Founded in 1985, the collective was made up of anonymous female artists who wore gorilla masks during public appearances. Calling themselves the “conscience of the art world,” they aimed to raise awareness and provoke conversation about the lack of representation of women and people of color in the art world. Emma Amos and May Stevens, represented by our partner gallery (RYAN LEE Gallery), were eventually revealed to be among the original members of the Guerrilla Girls. Stevens’s work is currently on view at RYAN LEE in the solo exhibition When the Waters Break. All of the posters on view once belonged to Emma Amos. The Guerrilla Girls staged protests, wrote articles and books, lectured at universities and arts organizations, and publicly displayed their posters. Using humor, data, audaciousness, and ethics, the Guerrilla Girls weren’t afraid to call out museums and galleries by name. These posters use simple yet bold designs to communicate powerful messages of equality. Above all, the Girls strove to carve out space in the art historical canon for marginalized artists. In their 2020 book, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, the group explains, “We decided to tell the story of women artists who should never be forgotten.” Guerrilla Girls posters are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; National Gallery of Art, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Modern, United Kingdom; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Kiki Smith: Prints, 1990-2006, an exhibition of prints by Kiki Smith. This is the gallery’s second solo exhibition of Smith’s work. Themes recurring throughout this selection include Smith’s inventive approach to self portraiture, a deep interest in nature and animals, and etchings created at a monumental scale. Equally known for sculpture, drawings, and prints, her transgressive early works confronted mortality and bodily decay. Printmaking became an essential part of Smith’s practice during the mid-1980s, and she persistently pushes the medium’s boundaries in terms of style, technique, and imagery. Smith explains, “Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I also think there’s a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.” Smith appreciates the detail and crisp lines that she is able to achieve with etching, which dovetails well with her chosen subject matter. She says, “I started drawing animals because I like to draw hair. I realized how similar we are to birds or other mammals. … How the hair and skin move on a face is the same as how hair patterns itself on an animal’s body.” For the massive print Pool of Tears 2, Smith was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s drawings for his own manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (the published book contained illustrations by Sir John Tenniel), as well as encyclopedia images of animals and birds. In this scene from the book, Alice has been shrunken down and has fallen into a pool of her own tears. Smith used the largest etching plate that the studio, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), could accommodate – in fact, the plate was so large that she sometimes had to sit on it as she worked. Kiki Smith 1993 is a self portrait by way of the digestive system, the full length of which is depicted here. Taking a unique approach, Smith has turned the body inside out to focus on the interior organs. Master printer Craig Zammiello remembers that Smith wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the paper and asked the ULAE team to wet the sheets down, a radical idea considering that the edition was already done: “Once these beautiful flat sheets were all finished, we just spritzed them down with a little pump sprayer and they curled and wrinkled and bubbled and that gives the prints that little bit of life that [Smith] was after.” Untitled (Hair) is Smith’s first lithograph. Produced in 1990, this print uses imprints of the artist’s own hair, face, neck, and even a “Cher” wig, to create an almost-abstract composition infused with motion and dynamism. One of the first prints in which Smith used her own body as a part of the printmaking process, Untitled (Hair) demonstrates her inventive approach when tackling themes of the human body, natural world, and personhood. Both Kiki Smith 1993 and Untitled (Hair) are unexpected approaches to self portraiture, expanding what the genre can encompass. Mary Ryan Gallery has placed Smith’s work in museums including Albertina Museum, Austria; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Chazen Museum of Art, WI; The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, VA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, NY; Hood Museum of Art, NH; Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, AL; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; National Gallery of Art, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, CT. Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) is a leading contemporary artist with a career spanning more than three decades. Known primarily for her sculpture and works on paper, Smith is a wildly experimental and innovative printmaker. She is constantly pushing the boundaries in the field in all areas, including style, technique, and imagery. Her work addresses feminist, philosophical, social, sexual, and political aspects of human nature. Her early work, transgressive in nature, dealt with mortality and decay, while her more recent work explores the natural world, portraiture, fairy tales, and myths. Smith’s work has been included in numerous recent solo exhibitions around the world, including Kiki Smith. Woven Worlds, Landes-Stiftung Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Germany (2024); Kiki Smith: Empathy, Diözesanmuseum Freising, Germany (2023); Kiki Smith: Free Fall, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea (2022); and Kiki Smith: From the Creek, Albuquerque Museum, NM (2022). In 2020, a solo exhibition of Smith’s work opened at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Switzerland, with an accompanying catalogue Kiki Smith: Hearing You with My Eyes edited by Laurence Schmidlin. A 2018 solo exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Kiki Smith: Procession, opened at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and traveled to The Belvedere, Austria. Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Albertina Museum, Austria; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Centre Pompidou, France; Long Museum, China; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Australia; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Germany; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Still Life with Remorse, an exhibition by Maira Kalman (b. 1949). This is Kalman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, accompanying her book of the same name. Meditating on the emotional weight of physical objects, Kalman presents beautiful, tender paintings with a hint of darkness. In this exhibition, the human presence is rarely seen but rather suggested through Kalman’s interiors and still lifes, all done with her signature sense of humor and exuberant use of color.

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to present Women Holding Things, a collection of over 30 new paintings by Maira Kalman. Created during the pandemic, it is a love song to the women in our world. This will be Kalman’s debut exhibition at Mary Ryan Gallery. “What do women hold?” Kalman asks. “The home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work. The work of the world. And the work of being human. The memories. And the troubles. And the sorrows and the triumphs. And the love.” Women Holding Things began in the spring of 2021 as Kalman and her son, Alex Kalman, created a limited-edition booklet by the same name which served as the conceptual basis of the publication and exhibition opening this fall. The booklet, which began as a fundraiser in support of charities combatting hunger, expanded to a full book published by HarperCollins with eighty-six paintings illustrating Kalman’s meditations on womanhood. The exhibition on view at Mary Ryan Gallery will include over thirty of the paintings originally published in the book. Each work on view is characterized by Kalman’s trademark style and use of dense gouache to create richly colored paintings on paper. Training her sensitive eye on the inimitable women in her life, Kalman captures with quiet power the essence of women that have captured her imagination via the objects that fit between their hands—from books to cabbages—and the wealth of meaning ascribed to these objects. In a tour de force of visual storytelling, she gently reveals the universality of the things her subjects hold dear—the things that burden, haunt, and nourish them. The objects held are tools—and occasionally, evidence—of a life lived, and as such, the inanimate objects captured in Kalman’s paintings are each pinned by the hope, joy and sadness of those that carry them. The figures holding things in Kalman’s paintings include a wide range of women. Some, like Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, Ayana V. Jackson, or Kiki Smith, are well known. Others, such as Kalman’s daughter, granddaughters, or cousin Iris, are fixtures of Kalman’s intimate life. Also included in Women Holding Things are select portraits of men, including Rilke and Chekov and Kalman’s father. Finally, there are portraits of objects holding things. All of Kalman’s subjects hold a rich interiority.

This November, we are showing highlights of our forty-year history at the ADAA’s The Art Show and at the gallery. These scant forty works (including sets and standalone works) on view cannot begin to cover the myriad of people, interests, and artworks that have marked forty years of activity, discovery, and growth.