Ryan Sullivan and Suzanne Hudson in Conversation
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Los Angeles and the final day of Ryan Sullivan's current exhibition at BLUM Los Angeles, join us for a conversation with Sullivan and Los Angeles–based art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson.
About Ryan Sullivan
Ryan Sullivan’s work commingles painting’s formal concerns and sculpture’s preoccupation with materiality. Where traditional painting builds out from the canvas, covering or obscuring the gestures that preceded, Sullivan’s process functions in the inverse—the first layer of resin forms the work’s initial structure and, later, becomes the object’s face. Thin and flat, unlike any oil or acrylic on stretched canvas ever could be, these resin paintings—with their smooth, matte surface—flaunt the duality of their station, defying art’s conventionally divided medium specificities of painting and sculpture.
Ryan Sullivan studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Sullivan was the subject of a significant solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL in 2015 with an accompanying catalog. The artist’s work has also been featured in exhibitions at public institutions, including Abstraction (re)creation, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); Aspen Art Week, Aspen Museum, Aspen, CO (2022); En Plein Air, The High Line, New York, NY (2019); Black Hole. Art and Materiality from Informal to Invisible, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2018); Good Dreams, Bad Dreams, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); New York Painting, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015); Surface Tension, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Empire State, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2013), and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010). Work by Sullivan is represented in numerous public collections including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Sullivan lives and works in New York, NY.
About Suzanne Hudson
Suzanne Hudson is Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. An art historian and critic, she writes with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting and process. She is also a regular contributor to Artforum and the Brooklyn Rail, and has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. Recent books include Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017) and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021).