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ANNE RYAN: EARTHLY DELITES AT HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY

Walking into the ‘Earthly Delites’ exhibition - which opened at Hastings Contemporary before the first Lockdown - you’d be forgiven for feeling more than a little nostalgic for a good old Bacchanalian romp! This joyful celebratory installation which occupied the entirety of Hastings Contemporary’s ground floor gallery space - instantly transported you to the fields of Glastonbury or a similar epic party experience. Surrounding you were a riot of colourful cavorting figures – dancing and entwining in glorious abandon – an experience that’s been greatly missed by everyone during this extraordinary year of quarantine.

Anne Ryan is a contemporary artist creating intensely vivid, cut out paintings made from card, collages, canvas, ceramic and metal that focus on figures in movement. These are three-dimensional free-standing works that take painting into a much more theatrical realm. Taking inspiration from Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights, which Ryan feels is “an amazing painting, full of people doing lots of things with very dark overtones”, she created a ‘pleasure garden’ installation at Hastings Contemporary this year. The way it was assembled around the room enticed the audience to wander around and through at their leisure – much as you would at a Festival or other large party.

Ryan has said about the cutouts: “I love the freedom they give me. Suddenly you’re not tied to the four walls of a canvas … For me painting is often to tear things down and to destroy - I set forth to destroy every single painting I had made on my MA, I just tore them apart. I am not very precious about paintings, so I had these big canvases which I started to cut and that was probably the first cutouts for me.”

Born in Limerick, Ireland, Ryan studied at Birmingham University and now lives in London. She has taught at a number of leading UK art schools and has exhibited work internationally. “I come from a country with a strong oral tradition, storytelling is a very, very important thing.” Ryan explains, “I used the old fashioned 'delites' spelling for this exhibition because I speak quite an old fashioned English but also because it's a bit rock and roll ”.

When Ryan first started playing around with this idea of cut-outs, she started to see stories coming out of this experiment – “they were very much like mourning figures in groups, very like Goya or El Greco, two of my all-time favourite painters. It was a real turning point for me.” She hints at the layers beneath the surface jollity, “they seem humorous, but they are not set out like that - there are dark moments within these paintings. I think humour in some ways is a bit of a tool to draw the viewer in.”

Ryan’s approach to her practice is refreshingly irreverent - “I never get too comfortable with the work. I always want to push further, creating chaos for myself, it's always about creating some kind of chaos when I leave the studio at night. This will be most evenings, as I tear things down to rebuild the next day. For me that kind of chaos, whether it's physical or mental, is really important in the studio. You often hear me talk about taking chances and trying different things, no one painting is important.”

Drawing is clearly central to her work. Video footage of Ryan in her studio shows her working on the cutouts – using the Stanley knife as you would a pencil when drawing the line - so reminiscent of Matisse’s later cut out technique of “drawing with scissors “.

Whilst on a fellowship in Rome, Ryan found she was filling up loads of sketchbooks with work - they were full of fragments of thoughts and movement within the city. “My sketchbooks continued to pile up around me and of course at the back of the sketchbook, there's card.” Ryan states, “I started cutting up the sketchbooks. It was quite direct, to begin with, and I thought, well, I'll just stand them around. I had one figure standing around the studio - the work could have been a statue from the Barberini or a Caravaggio painting.

When people visited, I often began showing my watercolours, but all they had eyes for were my cutouts! That is how you start seeing your work through other people's eyes and so in the end, I thought, right, I'm going to run with the cards.”

Ryan feels that as she gets older, she’s becoming more brazen and bold and doesn’t mind making a fool of herself. It’s liberating and she thinks we can learn from this. In characteristically self-deprecatory fashion, Ryan says that she “just put the work out” and loved how people engaged with them. “I think like a painter, as a maker, that's one of the things that worry us, frightens us - the distance between you the painting and the viewer, whether it's painting or making. I had a show at greengrassi gallery in London where all the cutouts were on the floor. I really wanted the audience to be animated around them. I wanted people to come into the space and if something fell over, I would think so what! We can't be precious!“

Most of the work here is card layered with acrylic or oil paint. Ryan has also started making some metal figures because everyone is worried that the card figures won't stand the test of time. She now loves the idea of using metal to make these figures bigger. So presumably larger scale painted assemblages are planned which will have quite an impact!

“Every time I have a show, I always have something in it that I am not totally sure about and I'm going to learn from it. You should learn from your own shows each and every time. Something is opening up, something is jarring, and something is fighting. That's often a way back into the studio because it's often a very hard thing going back into the studio and taking ideas back to the beginning.”

greengrassi.com

@anne_ryan_painter

By Charles Osaji & Stella Keen

All images © South Coast Squared

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