Ryan Mosley

About

Already acknowledged as one of the most distinctive of the àŠ»Newspeak' painters, British artist Ryan Mosley's first major solo exhibition opens at Alison Jacques Gallery early next year. Admired for what Art Review has described as 'hyperfigurative psychocubism', and an approach to painting which is at once both historical and fantastical, Mosley's work simultaneously acknowledges a profound debt to the received genres and traditions of art history and an exuberant willingness to subordinate such categories to a uniquely personal painterly vision. This exhibition develops Mosley's ongoing fascination with the aesthetics and motifs of various chapters in the canon of art history, whilst being faithful to a visual vocabulary entirely of his own making. The Renaissance collages of Arcimboldo and Hogarth's morality tales, Degas's dancers and Gauguin's exotic landscapes, Ensor's carnivalesque and the coarse ebullience of Guston are among the differing images and cultural episodes from which Mosley draws inspiration and to which he pays homage. Yet these subversive stylistic echoes of past masters, which are very often blended on the same canvas into dynamic art historical conversations, are not deployed simply to offer an idiosyncratic gloss on eras and artists which intrigue Mosley. Rather, they provide tools and contexts in which he can dramatise ad absurdum his interests in form and the fluid diffusion of narrative, and construct otherworldly scenarios and characters which are every bit as amusing, menacing, likeable and bewildering as the world we inhabit.