Kathleen Ryan

Gagosian is pleased to announce Roman Meal, an exhibition of two new sculptures by Kathleen Ryan at 17–19 Davies Street, London. In this, her solo debut at the gallery, Ryan mines ideas of utility and excess, luxury and repulsion, pondering culture’s inherent state of perpetual transformation while maintaining an appealing sense of the absurd.

Ryan is known for her surreal interpretations of everyday objects. To date she has realized a glistening jack-o’-lantern at human scale, fashioned a delicate pearl necklace from preloved bowling balls, and pierced the trunk of a 1968 AMC Javelin with an aluminum umbrella to produce cocktail garnish. Applying traditional techniques of making and ornamentation to natural and manufactured objects and materials, Ryan unites the organic and the artificial, producing tense yet self-aware meditations on desire, overabundance, and the cycle of life and death. Like one of the handwrought birds that reoccur within her practice, she plays among the ruins of late-capitalist America, gathering together both remnants of natural beauty and the emblems of overconsumption that led to this ultimate decay.

The exhibition at the Davies Street gallery comprises two new large-scale sculptures, Fender Bender and Sliced Bread (Golden Hour) (both 2025)—the first a pair of triangular lemon slices leaning upon each another, the second a slice of moldy bread slouched against the back wall of the room. Both works are contiguous with the ongoing series Bad Fruit (2018–), in which Ryan meticulously coats the surfaces of enlarged, decomposing foodstuffs with a near-painterly abundance of semiprecious stones. But Fender Bender and Sliced Bread (Golden Hour) are also linked by the shared history of their subjects as everyday and oft-discarded things, something that extends Ryan’s long-standing interest in salvage: in locating and illuminating the beauty that can be found in seemingly common things, from two thin slivers of lemon to the bumpers that were wrenched from the same car to form their aluminum rinds.