Winter Paintings

April 21 - May 22, 2016

Ryan Nord Kitchen

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to announce Winter Paintings, the first New York solo exhibition by Baltimore based artist Ryan Nord Kitchen.

Ryan Nord Kitchen’s inherently virtuoso landscape paintings pay homage to the Early American Modernists; Milton Avery, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley to cite a few. Shuttling between abstraction and representation, his canvases’ inclination toward pure gesture is refuted by referents to the natural world, both archetypal and impressionistic. Through the rhythmic play and integration of these fragmentary linear and planar elements, Kitchen cultivates a contemporary and stylized vernacular all his own.

Kitchen’s practice resides somewhere between drawing and painting. Through the use of flattened volumes, shallow depths of field, and the tension he casts between high formal contrasts (figure and ground, surface and depth), Kitchen at once advocates for the continuation of modernism's distrust of mimesis, while acknowledging abstraction's need for realism as counterpoint. If seemingly improvised, each of his marks is indeed measured, informed by both his own experiences of nature and a keen understanding of formal composition. Cumulatively, the works in the exhibition construct a lexicon of wintry vistas, moonlit gardens, sunlit pathways and river views, that encourages a reverent, if idiosyncratic, reading of the American landscape.

Ryan Nord Kitchen (1988. Minnesota, USA), obtained an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014, in addition to holding a BA from Luther College. His works have been presented internationally at The Galleri Jacob Bjørn in Aarhus, Denmark; NAM Project Milano, Milan, Italy, Rod Barton, London and Lulu, Mexico City. Kitchen lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.