Ina Gerken
A swirl of dust, a shift of sound
March 14 – April 27, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 14, 6:00-8:00pm

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce A swirl of dust, a shift of sound, an exhibition of new abstract gestural paintings by German artist Ina Gerken (b. 1987). Her process is one that yields to artistic instincts, often expressed through a method of heavily layered brush strokes, splatters, and streaks. This sense of movement embodies Gerken’s tendency toward an itinerant nature, wherein moving her studio from place to place can at times become a part of her practice. The five evocative paintings in A swirl of dust were produced in New York City in 2023, to which she traveled after being awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant. Large-scale and full of activity, her paintings collectively represent an homage to the city’s vibrant, unique sensory elements. This is Gerken’s first major solo presentation in New York. 

Gerken’s paintings are a dialogue between her subconscious and her mediums. She begins with a deliberately undefined end goal, allowing primordial approaches of observation and discovery to take the lead. “I try to absorb everything like a sponge or a container, and let it come to life in the works,” she says. The past five years have taken her from Berlin to London to Los Angeles to Maine to New York, where each scene is a blank canvas to explore. “I discover my own themes that may have been lying dormant inside me,” she says, citing the power of each new environment to function like a mirror, reflecting ideas and feelings back to her, to in turn respond to through painting.

In each vivid piece for A swirl of dust, Gerken manipulates the sounds and sensations of New York City through expressive shades of blues, greens, and violets, splaying them across the canvas with intense brush strokes, raw stipples, and impasto details. These works allude to concrete shapes but ultimately exist as abstractions, suggesting moods and temperaments, the timbre of a city street, or the momentary tumult of an inner landscape.  

Despite their reliance on energetic versus tangible subject matter, Gerken acknowledges the influence of specific characteristics of her locations. Inspired by the sounds of NYC as well as the “dust” of energy the city emits, she employs the visual motif of very small dots. By applying and then scaling the shape, Gerken offers an impression that mimics the transience of the city itself, rendering indecipherable whether the small and large forms are all dissolving apart, or are just coming together.

The surreal effects of Gerken’s approach are intensified by the scale of this series of artworks, which allows her to literally immerse herself in the meditative process of creating. Painting on the floor, she is enabled to actually “be in the painting” and, conversely, is granted the dual vantage point of then stepping out and away from it to survey the experience and impact afresh. Evading ideas or ideals of the end result, she loses herself in the physical and psychological act of painting, lettering herself  “drift, circle around something unknown, and discover how the invisible becomes visible.” Though in a sense spatially methodical, her process is fully reliant on intuition, and culminates in an un-anticipatable moment of recognition. “The picture emerges,” Gerken says, “and it exists out of itself.” 

The gestural energy of each painting invites viewers into the same physicalized, almost hypnotic sense of participation, finding their own recognitions or senses of meaning within it. Built on layers of exploration, action, and reaction, the artworks exist as testaments to the fluidity between reality and imagination, between rationale and intuition, between person and place.

Ina Gerken (b. 1987, Speyer, Germany) is a painter whose process-based practice is rooted in intuition and spontaneity. Relinquishing control, Gerken allows her paintings to unfold autonomously and follow their own logic. To keep her process alive and exciting, she embraces the rapidly drying medium of acrylic paint, modifying content quickly and at will. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world, including Logomo, Turku, Finland (2023); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (2023); Stiftelsen Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Vestfossen, Norway (2022); Deictorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (2020); and Bonn Museum of Modern Art, Bonn, Germany (2019), among others. Gerken studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently based in Düsseldorf, Germany. 

About RYAN LEE
Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.