Ryan Faherty

Ryan Faherty, Ripple (Lime), 2024, Mixed media on wood panel, 70 x 57 cm

Galerie PICI is delighted to present Ryan Faherty’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Pile On, running from August 14 to September 9, 2024. Pile On is an exhibition that delves into the intricate and layered world of mixed media artist Ryan Faherty. Central to this series are mixed media works on wood that combine painted, drawn, and printed material with sculptural elements on various substrates. Much in the same way that life seeks to spread and fill every available space, his work features anatomical imagery that is densely layered and woven together to create dynamic heaps of organic matter. His interest in anatomy comes from a fascination with the overwhelming complexity of organic life and its relationship to the environments it inhabits, probing the question: where’s the line between living and nonliving matter, and is there a line to be drawn? By mimicking this additive quality in life, he seeks to create artworks that collapse the boundaries between a figure and its environment. The tendency of life is to fill any available niche, crack, and crevice it possibly can. Guided by this, Pile On seeks to emulate and explore the inclination of life to not only persist, but to proliferate by building upon, enmeshing, subsuming, and digesting that which it comes into contact with.

Ryan Faherty, Ripple (Red), 2024, Mixed media on wood panel, 82 x 50 cm

The surfaces are thickly layered and incorporate three-dimensional elements, obfuscating the distinction between painting and sculpture. The compositional movement in Throughline (2023) is created by this interplay of dimensionality. The process is nonlinear, and the collage material from one piece often cross pollinates with that of another, creating connective threads throughout the work. Peel Off (2024) is the result of fabricating three versions of the same image, combining them into three new compositions, and then weaving those together into a single work. Each piece is a smaller iteration of a larger conceptual whole.

Ryan Faherty, Ripple (Purple), 2024, Mixed media on wood panel, 36 x 105 cm

Faherty’s method of producing iterations involves cutting, deconstructing, and recombining abstracted bodily imagery to compose new figurations. As seen in Clench (2024) and Splat (2024), the organic forms that comprise them generate the visual landscapes they inhabit. His approach is intentionally exploratory, allowing the undulating surfaces to dictate themselves. The overlapping masses are constantly in visual dialogue, making them both distinct and indivisible from one another. Each physical feature, such as eyes, teeth, and organs emerge and submerge back into the surface, lacking clear distinction as to who or what these features belong to. It’s critical to Faherty that there remains a mystery in the ontology of these figurations, especially to himself.

Ryan Faherty, Ripple (Blue), 2024, Mixed media on wood panel, 40 x 96 cm

Ryan Faherty (b. 1990, Boston, MA) is a New York City-based mixed media artist. He earned his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013. In addition to his sculptural paintings, Faherty extends his practice into the realm of artist books through a collaborative project called BELLY ACHE, where he translates his complex, layered aesthetic into an intimate, tactile format. His work has been exhibited at Paris Street Gallery in Boston, MA; in group exhibitions at Red Sky Studios in Boston, MA, and Ubique Gallery in New York, NY; and included in Art Book Fairs in Jersey City, NJ, and Boston, MA. Pile On is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Galerie Pici in Seoul, South Korea.

Galerie PICI
PICI Bldg. 25, Dosan-daero 87-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 512 2443

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