Ryan McGinley's Biography and Exhibitions at Saatchi-Gallery
Ryan McGinley was Born in Ramsey, New Jersey in 1977,currenly Lives and works in New York.New Jersey-born Ryan McGinley studied graphic design at New York's Parsons School of Visual Arts. In 1999 he sent 100 magazine editors and artists he admired a 50-page book of photographs he had produced on his desktop computer entitled The Kids Are Alright. The book consisted of exuberantly bacchanalian images of his friends in New York City. In these images, fellow artists like Hannah Liden, Dan Colen, Dash Snow and Emily Sundblad masturbate, roll joints, tag walls, and scamper naked in the woods. Like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, McGinley shot intimate portraits of friends far on the margins of social acceptability. But the humanity and poetry of his predecessors' work came from the pathos, pain and gallows-humor in their images, whereas the grittiness in McGinley's photographs glowed with the exuberant bliss of being young, hot and acting out. The day that Index magazine received the book, they called McGinley to fly to Berlin and shoot for editorial.
Drawn from skateboard, music, graffiti, and gay cultures, the subjects of Ryan McGinley?s photographs interact with the camera with a self-conscious candour that is at once shocking, banal, alluring and repulsive. The images exhibited at the Whitney show McGinley?s friends and lovers enacting the daily rituals of contemporary youth culture: they hang out, have sex, do drugs, go to gigs, and romp naked in the woods.Hung on the walls of one of the most respected art institutions in America, these photographs of youthful rebellion occupy a precarious position between the two seemingly disparate worlds of the art museum and the lifestyle magazine. It is this unstable status that makes the photographs so captivating yet ultimately problematic. When visiting Manhattan as a high school student in New Jersey, McGinley ? now just 25 ? was himself the subject of Larry Clark?s documentary photographs of skateboarders.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2004
? New Photographs, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center/The Museum of Modern Art, Long Island City, New York
? University of the Arts, Philadelphia
2003
? The Red Eye Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
? The Kids Are Alright, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
? Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto, Canada
2002
? Mc Magma, Milan, Italy
? Ryan McGinley: Photographien, Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin
2000
? The Kids are Alright, 420 W. B'way, New York
Conclusion:
Ryan McGinley's well-crafted and carefully selected images actually did what photography claims to do - they captured fleeting moments. His models were not professional kids paid to produce some simulacrum of youthful cool.
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Find more information about Ryan McGinley Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/ryan_mcginley.htm
View Ryan McGinley paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Ryan McGinley artist. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Ryan McGinley
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