Ryan Sullivan

Built up in multiple layers, Sullivan’s large-scale paintings reflect his dynamic and constantly-evolving mode of abstraction, with each painting standing as a physical record of its own creation – both embodying and describing material flows and physical processes. Distinctive and unrepeatable, Sullivan’s works have been praised for their assertion of painting's enduring critical importance and potential.

Sullivan begins each of his pieces with the same elements: a three-room industrial studio, resin, a rubber mold, pigment, a studio dog named Calvin, and time. But how does one improvise on known variables? How does one practice spontaneity? “I’ve created a process that destabilizes me,” Sullivan says when asked how he retains the improvised feeling in a well-oiled framework.

“When making work, I rely on a lot of emotion and physicality.” Mood, then, can be an artist’s tool and medium at once. Everything is made in Sullivan’s studio, from the molds to the frames. The molds, cast from a shallow sheet of plexiglass, are made from rubber and covered with plaster to hold their shape.

The resin is painted into these molds and then it’s a race against time to manipulate the medium to a desired, but not overwrought, outcome before it hardens. Once set, the resin is both the painting and the painting’s support. With the mold placed on the ground, Sullivan moves around the work as it’s created. Like any good improviser, he adheres to formal structures but never plays the same composition twice. Though identical “notes” are repeated, the riffs change over time to increase the depth of the composition.

Just as Sullivan plays with the temporality of a timeless medium like painting, he is also interested in how time can change his own perspective on his work: the paintings are stored out of sight for months, after which time he returns to look at them. Sullivan both conceptually and literally distances himself from his own work so that he can see it as objectively as possible, looking for unintended motifs and threads that hold the works together despite their spontaneity.

In 2015 he staged a major solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami — his first one-person exhibition in a US institution. Other solo exhibitions include his 2013 presentation at Hydra's Workshop, Hydra, Greece. In 2013, he was artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva (FL), and artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa (TX). In october 2019, he had his first solo show in London.