Timothy Taylor Gallery

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Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Berlin-based, American artist Ryan McLaughlin. In recent years McLaughlin’s paintings have taken their inspiration from a range of sources including historical and imagined sports heroes of the American baseball leagues, modern medicine, and amateur botany.
Characterised by fixed rules, codes, and subsequently a lack of ambiguity, these areas of interest and their accoutrements are completely at odds with the nebulous nature of painting practice. McLaughlin’s compositions inhabit and acknowledge this zone of difference – between logic or rational systems and the absurdities of image making – and celebrate the irony of affirmation.

The gossamer focus and warm golden spotlighting with which the artist imbues his paintings generates a sense of nostalgia and suggest bygone glories often staged in bucolic settings. McLaughlin invests his chosen objects, be it an animated broom, a hovering sports shirt, or a sedate classical vase, with anthropomorphic qualities. His use of robust strokes of paint add further vigour to his whimsical but heartfelt surrogate subjects.

In his ‘collage’ series of paintings invented generic pictorial elements are painted in the manner of a still life via a form of shorthand illustrative notation. Recalling compositional aspects of early analytical cubism and the stylistic qualities of Punch and New Yorker cartoons, these paintings communicate the idea of an image as it might look in the minds eye. The format and relatively small scale of these works is such that they evoke souvenir postcards, serving as they do as signs of a past visual experience.

Nantucket Collage (2010), which features a lighthouse, seagull, patches of seersucker and navy blue blazer, functions as an aspirational mise en scene, complete with all the tasteful and picturesque elements necessary for coastal leisure activities.

Ryan McLaughlin was born in 1980 in Worcester, MA. He now lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from B.F.A Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Nottle, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin, Germany (2009); Robinson, Groeflin/Maag, Zurich, Switzerland (2008); Finley Park, Alexandre Pollazzon Ltd., London (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Waking the Dead, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany (2010); When the Mood Strikes…;The Collection of Wilfried & Yannicke Cooreman-de Smedt, MDD Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2009); I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me to See Me Lookin’ Back, Loraini Alimantiri-gazonrouge, Remap 2, Athens, Greece.

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