Exhibition Review: Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley
“Tev”
digital chromogenic print
2022
Written by Sophie Mulgrew
Copy Edited by Robyn Hager
Photo Edited by Alanna Reid
Ryan McGinley’s photo collection Peak Swift at the Baldwin gallery in Aspen, Colorado is disarmingly beautiful. McGinley’s eighteen large-scale images are at once portraits and landscape shots– they draw attention to both the human form and its environment, and question whether those two elements are really so distinct from one another. McGinley’s work challenges traditional photographic categories and asks the viewer to embrace discomfort.
Ryan McGinley
“Atlas”
digital chromogenic print
2022
Throughout the images, McGinley’s subjects appear in the nude. They are of varying skin tone and body size, creating between them a diverse representation of the human form and its visual manifestations. McGinley places his subjects in and around different natural landscapes; they clamber between boulders, over hills of ice, and down sand dunes. In all of the images, the subjects are notably active. They run, jump, and stretch their way through their environment, always in contact with the earth that surrounds them. Even in the more quietly posed photos, the subjects contain a palpable potential energy– the viewer has a sense that these people have just, or will soon, leap in motion.
Ryan McGinley
“Ivy (Bubbles)”
digital chromogenic print
2022
What is perhaps most striking about the photos is their simplicity. McGinley wisely refrains from adding anything unnecessary to the shot. He lets the context of the natural world work for him; finding compositions among the environment rather than creating them. McGinley plays with texture, depth, line, and framing. He creates compositions that are effortless yet disciplined, simple but deeply moving. The stripped down nature of the photo’s context is mirrored in the (literally) stripped down nude bodies within. The figures appear in their most natural forms– pure and uninhibited.
Ryan McGinley
“GSDNP”
digital chromogenic print
2022
This sense of purity is also reflected in the figure’s physicality. They move freely, without concern as to how they may appear. They are unaware that they are being witnessed. In many of the shots, the figures feel almost child-like; they climb and dance, throw sand into the air and hold tumbleweeds aloft. McGinley’s subjects are curious and exploratory but not presumptuous– they exist in tandem with the world around them rather than in control of it. McGinley asks the viewer to consider their own relationship with the natural world, particularly in the context of our current ecological disaster. He gestures to childhood and the past, when nature existed as a partner in exploration rather than a resource to be exploited.
Ryan McGinley
“Reflections”
digital chromogenic print
2022
McGinley’s work is a return to the essential elements of great photography. His images depict sophisticated explorations of light, shadow, line, texture, and perspective. They accentuate the beauty of the human form through radical minimalism. In Peak Swift McGinley proposes that what is natural is also, inherently, beautiful, and must therefore be protected at all costs.
Ryan McGinley
“Ecru”
digital chromogenic print
2022
