Ryan Wallace

With his fragmented paintings, collages, prints, sculptures, and drawings, New York-based artist Ryan Wallace exhibits an acute attention to texture, as, across the board, his compositions display vivid qualities that border on the geological. Building up strips of various materials on a single surface—these can be rough, smooth, gestural, flat, reflective, or matte—Wallace’s work constantly evokes tactile or natural occurrences like rock outcroppings, seascapes, molecules, or even, on a more macro level, galaxies. Wallace’s 2012 Redactor series, for instance, features chaotic and multidimensional collaged paintings, which draw from art-historical styles such as those championed by the Color Field painters and Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th century. 

Wallace’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Islip Art Museum in Islip, New York, the PIMA Air & Space Museum in Tucson, the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He has published numerous books as well as organized more than a dozen exhibitions as an independent curator. Wallace was the 2011 recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, and he was an SIP fellow in the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 2010.