There’s a lot going on at Mark Ryden’s show at the Kohn Gallery– The Gay 90s:West. The paintings are incredibly detailed as are the frames. In one room there is a diorama-like sculpture that for a penny becomes an active parade through an intricately created town. There are also listening booths for a record created for the show in which several pop artists, including Katy Perry, Tyler the Creator and Nick Cave recorded versions of Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).
From the press release:
In the inaugural exhibition Mark Ryden, underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten “Gay 90s”. Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America—women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages—Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture. This important new body of work—which includes paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculpture—negotiates the aesthetic value of clichéd nostalgia through the lens of polished neoclassic painting, and will include Ryden’s largest and most ambitious work to date, The Parlor (Allegory of Magic, Quintessence and Divine Mystery): a 96 x 120 inch painting with a wooden frame hand-carved in bas-relief.
It’s hard to tell what it all means, but it is certainly worth checking out for the spectacle. This show closes 6/28/14.
