David Ryan
Undergraduate and post graduate studies:
Central School of Art, National Gallery of Victoria School
of Art, Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Melbourne.
Masters MFA at RMIT University, Melbourne.
30 Solo exhibitions in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Auckland and Nelson.
10 at the Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, Sydney.
4 at Whitespace Gallery, Auckland.
(model of) (conditions for) glacier 2010
Elsewhere (FSA) 2011
Nature Studies (broken sounds) 2014
Rain Talking Mountain 2018
2 at The Suter Art Gallery, Nelson.
(model of) (conditions for) glacier 2009
HARBINGER (ice across the path (wield the broom) 2022
3 at Quiet Dog Gallery, Nelson.
Last Trace (pale ice dark light) 2023
Never Walking Mountain 2020
Periphery 2018
Including "Nightwalks" La Trobe Valley Regional Gallery, Victoria, Australia.
"Circle" Monash University Gippsland gallery Australia. Artist in Residence
"Revised Standard Notion of Deity" installation Brisbane College of Arts Gallery.
"Signs, Elements, Journeys" Brisbane College of Arts Gallery, Australia.
"(conditions for) (model of) Journey With" RMIT Gallery, Melbourne Australia.
"(model of) (conditions for) Iceberg". Mass Gallery, Melbourne.
34 curated Group exhibitions
in Australia, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart
Auckland, Nelson, New Zealand, and Giessen Germany.
4 at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
2 at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. including "Perspecta" (curated by Tony Bond)
4 at the Suter Art Gallery, Nelson.
including "Ice and Fire" (curated by Julie Catchpole) 2023
"Dionoia" (curated by Anna Marie White) 2011
"Re- Site Re-seen" (curated by Julie Catchpole and Anna Marie White) 2011
"West East" (curated by Anna Marie White) 2010
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Art Gallery West Australia, Perth,
Art Gallery Hobart, Tasmania.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
University Art Museum, Brisbane.
Canberra Art Gallery and Museum. Canberra.
Port Jackson Press, Melbourne.
Moet and Chandon Fellowship Touring exhibition.
Auckland Art Fair.
Kunsthalle, Giessen, Germany. (installation "Shining in the Dark" with video animation, electronic sound) 2010
Video Animation and Electronic Sound
"HARBINGER" single channel video animation 13.38 min. with electronic sound track 2022
"Moon" single channel video animation 5.16 min. with electronic sound track 2022
"The Abrasion of Two Stones Compared to the Sound of a Glacier" electronic sound 120 min. 2021 - 2022
"Listening Station" single channel video animation 12.20 min. with electronic sound track 2011
"electroseance (for CMcC)" video animation 2.10 min. with electronic sound 2009 and 2011
"Shining in the Dark" video animation 6.34 min with electronic soundtrack. 2009 -2010
Collections
Australian National Gallery, Canberra, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Griffith University, Brisbane, Artbank, Sydney, Atlantic Richfield Corporation, USA, Stan Bierderman Collection USA, Arts House Trust (former Wallace Collection), Auckland.
Private collections in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK and Canada.
Former Co- Director of Project Space gallery, Melbourne
Curator, emedia gallery, CCP. Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne.
Senior lecturer, program coordinator RMIT University Melbourne.
Lived and worked in Australia, India and Malaysia and resides in Nelson, New Zealand.
Contact.
[email protected]
[email protected]
davidryanartist.com
Selected and Abridged Critiques of Previous Exhibitions.
On the Heights With the Master.
Stunning show captures grandeur and terror of the mountains.
It is not often that work in a local gallery suggests an immediate comparison with an aspect of one of the truly great painters of the past but some work by David Ryan at Whitespace instantly recalls the watercolour paintings of J.M.W. Turner. The height, loneliness and terrifying nature of the terrain are all stunningly captured.
The two large paintings that make up “Scholar!s Rocks” are done with watercolour and Chinese ink and mysterious techniques special to the artist. They are immensely complex images with plunging, fractured rock faces as well as swirling clouds and stunted trees bent by the wind. They are an astonishing pair.This is part of the whole eccentric drama of the exhibition.
The grand paintings are accompanied by sculptures, models and collections of old images drawn as photographs, as well as notes apparently made by explorers of remote regions.
The gallery is dominated by a long model of a glacier. This and the DVD loops in the show are clever but commonplace compared to the grandeur of the paintings.
Altogether this is the most stunning exhibition seen in Auckland for a long time.
T.J.McNamara Art critic Auckland Herald. exhibition (conditions for) glacier. Whitespace gallery Auckland. NZ.2010
Equally ambitious and often large in scale is the work of David Ryan at Whitespace Gallery in a show called Elsewhere. He paints remote, difficult landscapes and depicts countenances that show the drain on those explorers who chose to venture into them. He also references the documentation that remains after their death. The landscapes, watercolour and oil, are marvellous things. The technique that creates them is mysterious and amazing. It is equally capable of catching the tumultuous rush of water, wind- driven clouds or a bare face of rock.
These paintings have something of the atmosphere of Turner's alpine watercolours and the handling is as fascinating as the intricate work of a confident abstract expressionist.
The oil Elemental Mountain with its tiny glimpses of blue and the sweep of wind in Never Walking Mountains are particularly spectacular examples.
As in his previous work, Ryan's skill is to make each work a special thing by adding the characteristics of old documents. To achieve this, the paper is browned and hand-written notes and diagrams are added.
His portraits are of men who might have explored such a wilderness. The strain of their efforts is writ large on their faces, especially in the eyes. Yet there are elements of heroism, notably in Traveller 1 (lines of sight), where the profile of the traveller has eyes lifted resolutely towards the distance.
The paintings are supported by sculptures, enhanced photographs and a CD of sound.
Ryan is an artist of many things and they all sit somewhere between reality and vision.
T.J.McNamara Art critic Auckland Herald exhibition Elsewhere(FSA) Whitespace gallery Auckland. NZ 2011
An exhibition by David Ryan is always spectacular.
His show at Whitespace is called Nature Studies but the paintings are far more than simple preliminary studies; they are tumultuous events. His technique is like no other. The only comparison that readily occurs is Joseph Turner. Like the great British artist's high Romantic paintings of the Swiss Alps, the complex surfaces of Ryan's images suggest high mountain landscapes almost lost in swirling gusts of mists and snow with masses of rock just visible through the weather.
This complexity is achieved by layers of paint and other substances applied, then rubbed, sanded and scraped so under-layers emerge and disappear again as a range of stony surfaces and colour, clouded and shot through with white. A link to early surveyors' maps and charts is given by various labels and stamps in the corners.
T.J.McNamara Art critic Auckland Herald exhibition Nature Studies Whitespace gallery Auckland. NZ 2014
Through the exhibition and specifically with the sculptural works included the memory of Joseph Beuys pervades in his attitude to both life and work and is quoted by Ryan, “Art can sometimes be mistaken for life.” The assemblages, the fragmentary notes, the vitrines and Ryan's red stamp, links him to the enigmatic German artist. Beuys became infatuated with his notion of Eurasia and the spiritual but bleak terrain is not unlike that of his contemporary, the Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky in The Stalker. Ryan's fabricated world evokes similar terrain but acknowledges the almost impossible task of working from nature that art is ultimately mediated by its culture.
Errol Shaw.extract from catalogue "HARBINGER ice across the path (wield the broom)" PLAN B (extracts) unpublished text (revisited) 2022
David Ryan's work on show at the Catchment gallery is a stunning and luminescent collection.
A series of three pieces entitled Field Site (archive) is presented in museum style glass cases.
Each contains a ghostly watercolour figure with tantalising scraps of what appears to be diary texts, a model of a ship or vessel and some other artefact. The implied narrative is of lost explorers and scant surviving evidence. The effect is arresting.
Matt Bowler Art critic Nelson Mail exhibition Field Site (archive) Catchment Gallery Nelson NZ.
Ryan's impressive and compelling exhibition evokes a sublime emotion but the artist, despite all his abilities to conjure up artistic illusions, is utterly powerless in stopping the actual disappearance of our glaciers. In this post- photographic era the nineteenth century dichotomy of the romantic painting and the unmediated photograph converge. Ryan's imaginative world operates like those of his contemporaries such Andeas Gursky and Jeff Wall, who manipulate their digital photographs, confusing the viewer!s vision and veracity of evidence with a sense of authenticity. Transitory images from watercolour to DVD in this exhibition take us in another direction within this nomadic narrative; the DVD articulated landscapes reconstruct themselves within the cinematic mythical landscapes created by Peter Jackson.
If these glaciers are retreating, the hybrid image reveals from the detritus displaced paintings by Colin McCahon. To enter, navigate through and leave David Ryan's exhibition is to contemplate Jorge Luis Borge, “Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end”.
Errol Shaw Excerpt from catalogue exhibition "(model of) (conditions for) glacier" Sutter Gallery Nelson NZ 2010.
Working outside our established western cultural tradition, David Ryan uses paleolithic signs, personal notations and diagrams to evoke a totemic landscape representing different concepts of seeing and perceiving time and space.
Influenced by journeys through India, his work under the series title “Signs of Passing – Notations from a Journey” is emblematic of an alternative way of perceiving the world.
Robert Lindsay Former gallery director & curator contemporary art National Gallery of Victoria, exhibition "Relics and Rituals" at NGV
David Ryan is an artist who has consistently searched for a mode of painting which will communicate a personal history and philosophy to both himself and the viewer.
His work relates to the idea of the cargo cult as the performance of an activity, futile in itself, but intended to bring about a desired result which is unconnected with the nature of the activity.
He believes that the rituals of art-making and its magical properties express a similar philosophy.
Although these images all have profound and complex meaning and develop over whole series of paintings, sometimes transformed to the extent that they become virtually unrecognisable, they are signs of events, experiences and states of mind which work to re-inform the artist. The different components interlock with a feeling of precision and wholeness that belies their apparent randomness and indicates the sure foot with which the artist traverses his chosen territory.
Caroline Miley Art Historian. Senior Lecturer in Art History Monash University, Australia exhibition "Perspecta" Art Gallery NSW