Michael Ryan's drawings are made by pasting together smaller drawings on paper, each revealing a separate portion from the found photographs with which he primarily works. The final result is often works of monumental scale, with a painstaking attention to detail. Ryan has worked with such posed groupings as class portraits, wedding parties, and family reunions. In these images, the identities of the subjects are framed both by membership and by a particular moment in time.

 

Differences in graphic affect from sheet to sheet, the wrinkling that results from gluing together many separate elements, and the inevitable damage to borders caused by handling, bring forth in the finished work a quality of age that supplements the past moments documented in Ryan’s subject matter.

 

Michael Ryan lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ryan has exhibited with WanWan Lei Projects of New York and Giacobetti Paul Gallery of Brooklyn, NY. Also he is currently a resident at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program in Brooklyn, NY.