2016 Catalogue Archive

The small scale paintings of Ryan Nord Kitchen exude an ease and confidence through the artist’s tangle of lines spread across a linen surface. In Dawn, the yellow-to-goldenrod background hosts strokes of red, black, blue, and green, which interact with each other without overlapping. The gestural lines stop and restart where they cross, a detail that is easy to overlook yet lends nuance to the piece. The deceptively simple works were included in Kitchen’s debut New York show this spring, which was praised by New York Times critic Roberta Smith: “Whether in the background or foreground, nearly every brushstroke or scumble reads as an independent entity…Altogether we sense painting as a performance, an act of personal inscription (like poetry) and a system.”