RYAN MCGINLEY’S ADVENTURES
As Always, Pretty Free At The Marlborough
Marlborough presents American artist Ryan McGinley‘s Pretty Free in a solo exhibit through April 25th and the images are now generously available to view on Marlborough’s website.
Ryan McGinley literally burst upon the scene in 2000 and was the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney in 2003. He was only 25. He captures beautiful and somewhat forbidding landscapes with nudes of friends with a raw energy unique only to the artist. He continues to stun us. The danger that lurks in his photography reminds one of Larry Clark and his images of friends in Tulsa but here McGinley sets the edginess in staggering views of nature.
The show spans several years of work but has an emphasis on new work from 2020. McGinley continues his exploration of the nude both in the studio and in his magnificent outdoors. The work ranges in scale from large banners to intimate portraits.
The opposite human qualities of vitality and vulnerability are framed in nature’s grandest offerings. In a very boy-like embrace of nature, Mcginley is thrilled to take us to the highest treetops, inside ice caverns, climb up cliff sides and swim in dark lakes under even darker nights. He mixes the colors and forms of everything nature offers from fields of gold, nighttime bonfires, stone and desert sand, trees of magnificent shapes and takes our breath away by adding nude figures into these sacred places.
Quite the contrast is the entire ceiling that is covered in hundreds of portraits from the Mcginley’s ongoing series Yearbook which were all shot in a studio. It is a powerhouse installation and the individual portraits are very Ryan McGinley and sublime. In the third gallery is a special selection from the artist’s recent series Mirror, Mirror. Ryan McGinley gave cameras to friends and asked them to shoot themselves nude in a mirror at their own home. The results are exquisitely diverse in execution and are wonderful self portraits of humanness.
After viewing the exhibit, I am at once reminded never to lose the spirit of Ryan Mcginley’s visual world as it calls to a more primitive pulse in all of us, a time when we were experimenting with danger and celebrating our bodies in the glory of nature.
