Matthew Ronay at Marc Foxx

Artist: Matthew Ronay

Exhibition title: SURDS

Venue: Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, US

Date: April 29 – June 3, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

MARC FOXX is pleased to present SURDS, an exhibition of new sculpture by New York based Matthew Ronay, the artist’s sixth solo with the gallery.

In her text for Matthew Ronay’s recent Pérez Museum exhibition, curator Diana Nawi writes:

“[…] While articulating the lessons of form and autonomy that emerged from modernist, conceptual, and minimalist practices, Ronay also employs unruly colors, organic forms, intimate scales, guration, spirituality, folk traditions, psychedelia, and mythology. Perhaps it is this coupling of seemingly incompatible forms and ideas—its voracious and promiscuous conversation with art histories from around the world and across temporalities—that distinguishes his work from dominant trends in contemporary art and lends it an insistent timelessness. Attuned to the legacies of modernism, the open possibilities of the contemporary, and the potency of the otherworldly, Ronay’s works feel primeval and futuristic, intuitive and labored, private and social, like something both familiar and like something we have never seen.”

In the exhibition Ronay introduces mathematical principles, architectural space, and landscape in dialogue with his exuberant investigation into the areas of mythology, ritual artifacts, folk forms, the body, biology, and scientific/metaphysical systems. Mathematical concepts have long held interest for Ronay and in Surds (a number, especially the irrational root of an integer) factor into the sculptures’ integral process and logic. The nine pedestal-bound sculptures incorporate their “bases” in new ways that imply terrain, strata, and foundation, and suggest the works could be viewed as larger sites. In addition to the works on pedestal are four wall-based yellow-golden sculptures that the artist has referenced as “gates,” nodding to Eastern spiritual spaces and traditions.

The mathematical, architectural and landscape concepts are underscored by the installation’s strict geometry, which brings to mind ceremonial space and cityscape, although subverted by the artist’s primary colored fabric covered plinths, which soften and blur the hard edge-ness and complicate the relationships with Ronay’s colorful signature palette.

Recent solo exhibitions include When Two Are In One, Pérez Museum of Art, Miami (2016); Matthew Ronay, Blaffer Museum of Art, Houston (2016); Dock, Berth, Antenna, Markus Lüttgen, Cologne, Germany (2016), Organ/Organelle, MARC FOXX, Los Angeles (2014); and The Door is Open, Kunstveiren Lingen, Germany (2014). Selected group exhibitions include The Natural Flow of Things, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain (2016), and J’adore, Kunsthalle Linge, Lingen, Germany (2015).