Matthew Ronay
Wavelength
June 28 – August 22, 2014
Gallery 2
Andrea Rosen Gallery is pleased to present Wavelength, a project-based exhibition of Matthew Ronay’s meditative daily drawings. Realizing an integral pillar of the Gallery 2 mission, the exhibition sheds light on an unexplored aspect of the artist’s practice, presenting a uniquely content driven and experimental exhibition.
Finding ritual in repetition, Ronay’s abstract and richly saturated gouaches navigate the human respiratory system. The selected works exhibited represent a greater project structured by daily engagements over the course of 100 sittings, putting color to paper, and drawing from what Ronay refers to as “muscle memory,” an unconscious tracing of forms, curves and weights that come from one’s inner being. Based on shapes called wavelengths, the amorphous drawings, vibrating, linear and obtuse on purple scapes, mimic the chambers of the body and embody breathing exercises that rise and fall, flux and sustain.
Often presenting immersive and enigmatic sculptural installations, which embody and explore bodily processes and portals, bringing a heightened awareness to the human experience, Ronay here isolates a single engagement, a self-circling process that extends beyond the realm of form and relates not only to his art, but to the artist himself. Discovering the personal within this rhythm, Ronay precipitates the device of repetition, a device that, as Josef Helfenstein describes, “has to do with the importance of emotion.” Tracing an obsessive continuity of imagery, Ronay’s engagements illuminate a strong historic lineage of ritual and repetition that transcends art history, while retaining a resonant emotive quality grown from inner necessity.
Matthew Ronay was born in 1976 in Louisville, Kentucky. His work was recently subject of a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Lingen, Germany. Earlier solo institutional presentations include concurrent presentations at the University of Louisville, Kentucky and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KT in 2013; Luettgenmeijer, Berlin; La Conservera, Murcia, Spain; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. His work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennale and in the 12th Lyon Biennial in 2013; as well as notable international exhibitions at the Schirn Kuntshalle, Frankfurt; LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Germany; the Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art, Oslo; and Serpentine Gallery, London. Ronay currently lives and works in New York.
For media inquiries please contact Lance Brewer at l.brewer@rosengallery.com, or Jen Joy at jen@suttonpr.com.
