RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Scenic Microcosms: Wallpapered Rooms Painted by Andrew Raftery. The solo exhibition features ten penetrating views of landmark wallpapers, represented in watercolor. Each work depicts a scene of real-life interiors from across New England whose ornate, ornamental wallpapers inspire questions about the colonialist roots of their creation, installation, and ongoing appreciation. Raftery’s watercolors balance his genuine admiration and deference to the allure and precision of the wallpaper’s artistry, while engaging with contemporary cultural criticism.

Known for his expressions of contemporary conditions through the use of seemingly archaic mediums, for example copperplate engraving and ceramic transfer, Raftery’s fascination with wallpapers carries forth his interest in marrying ancient art-making processes with the conditions and vantage points of today. A fine artist but also a scholar, he contextualizes each of his ten scenes in an extensive catalog photo-essay, published as a complement to the exhibition. 

The paintings in Scenic Microcosms zoom-in on the refined interiors of stately houses and public buildings. Their subtexts, however, carry the heavier cultural weight of specific antique wall-arts, made in late 18th- and early 19th-century China and in 19th-century colonial-era France, as installed to this day in contemporary sites. “Much of my time is spent reveling in the brilliant achievements of the artists and craftspeople who preceded me,” Raftery says. “But the seductiveness of their achievements does not hide those images in the wallpapers that sit uncomfortably at this point in history.”

Produced from 2021 – the earliest site visit was on Raftery’s first road trip since the start of Covid, taken in February 2021 to the Baltimore Drinking Room at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware – to this year, Raftery takes us on a journey with him across historical New England and into some of its most esteemed architectural interiors. Situating himself through immediate and intimate presence within a room and in front of a walls’ artistry – each a multitude of scenes and fables ripe for interpretation with a contemporary historian’s lens – Raftery not only illustrates the scenes with his own hand but also offers us, through both his written catalog narrative and discerningly contextualized recreations, requisite criticism of the century/ies-old subject matter through the eyes of our current era.

“Contemplating these works in the rooms and recreating them in the studio counters the impulse to elide or gloss over what was there to be seen ever since the first magnificent (and problematic) scenic paper, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique was released by [19th-century French wallpaper artisans] Dufour in 1804.”  –  Andrew Raftery

With the watercolors on view in Scenic Microcosms, Raftery spent years studying or considering the composition, structure, and geography of every wallpaper depicted. The scenes enamored him, and he cites the artworks as “some of the most ambitious prints ever made.” Each of his illustrative reenactments is the result of countless hours of attentive in-person sketching, leading to dozens of preliminary pencil drawings, then to a lithographic drawing and grisaille for each work before its realization in final, painted form. The complexity of his process reveals the complexity of the questions the works are posing: how may we handle these objects of awe-inspiring beauty, at once a relic of colonialist thought and a legitimately rare and precious artifact of art history? 

Raftery’s journey, his perceptive contextualizations, and his fastidiously composed scenic re-presentations at once grant us guidance, and open the doors for us to step into these questions and through the thresholds of each ornamented space, to discover the wonder on our own.

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.