NYAB Event - Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere"

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At Team Gallery
Media: Photography

For his latest exhibition, Ryan McGinley has shifted his focus away from constructing a youthful sublime within the boundless American landscape and has concentrated instead on creating imagery within the confines of his New York studio. The result is a surprisingly restrained, open-ended study of black and white portraiture. Here we see McGinley not as a chronicler of youthful adventure, but as an engine for an almost scientific cataloging of a kind of emotional optimism.

McGinley's portraits are the result of a meticulous studio practice, in which thousands of images are taken of each sitter; each shoot eventually being edited down to its one defining "moment". During the course of two years, McGinley photographed about 150 hand-picked subjects from across the globe. Bringing these models into his studio and stripping them of their clothing, the artist has succeeded in answering his own question: "What would a classical Ryan McGinley black and white portrait look like?"

In addition to the black and white photographs, the exhibition will also include three large-scale images in color, which locate the other works within the continuity of McGinley's oeuvre. Characteristically exuberant, these photographs add a narrative backdrop to the exhibition, which initiates an ambiguous loop between the two approaches. McGinley's photographs have always mined the space between chaos and control, negotiating the space between the really-real and the only-apparently-so. In this exhibition the push and pull of nature and the studio, of sumptuous color and its absence, create a dynamic tension.

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Eric Morrell