The Residence Gallery is pleased to announce The Hungry Eye, an exhibition of new oil paintings by artist Liam Ryan. In his fourth solo showing with the gallery, we delve deeper into Liam’s divine imagination for fresh encounters with Deadly Depression from Mars, A Doubtful Torpedo, A Brazilian Alien A Long Time Ago and “scrollwork gone wild and overgrown.”
Liam’s semi-automatic approach forms organic-like images that change, illuminate and mutate as the work progresses. His paintings in their thick multi-layers are testament to the time spent on them. The finished images, from life-size to microscopic, are the final stage of pooling together many details of interest and visual conundrums. Liam’s works are windows to the world of painting rather than the actual world itself.
The work, created over the past 2 years, has been forged together from “scrapped paintings,” re-vamped during a period of time occupied by searching for something new and working through confusion in both painting and the artist’s life. The paintings aim at the purity of imagination and resist contextualization in the frames of conceptual or political art.
Liam Ryan was born in 1983 Cork, Ireland, and is now primarily based in London. He graduated with an MA at Central St. Martins on a scholarship from Lismore Castle Arts (2009). Prior to graduation, Liam was awarded the prestigious Royal Dublin Society Taylor Prize for painting (2006). He has exhibited in Ireland, Berlin, China, Miami and London, and his work is in private collections in the UK and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Protovision (2013) and Liam Ryan at international art fair, Pulse Miami curated by Ingrid Z for The Residence Gallery (2012). Liam’s work has also been recently shown in group and solo exhibitions in London curated by James Birch. The Hungry Eye has been specially selected to feature in The Residence Gallery’s 10th year anniversary programme.