Ryan Mrozowski

Kindly donated by the artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco

Ryan Mrozowski (b. 1981) is an American artist living and working in New York. Working primarily with acrylic paint on stretched linen, Mrozowski renders images that are convincingly legible, yet far from lifelike. Taking natural forms—flowers, fruit, birds—as their subjects, Ryan Mrozowski’s artworks deconstruct and distort familiar motifs from art-historical traditions of still life painting, calling attention to the active role of viewership and inviting interrogation into unexpectedly profound aspects of perception. 

Mrozowski’s paintings often present ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, visual information. Each composition from the ongoing body of artworks, Untitled (Shifted Flowers), depicts an array of flowers transposed over itself. The resulting double-images seem almost to vibrate, as if the paintings were derived from a transitional moment between frames of a film. By foregoing granular detail and occasionally providing paradoxical visual cues, Mrozowski’s images achieve a characteristic balance of depiction and abstraction, resulting in pictures that are—on first glance—urgent, enticing, and beautiful, but which also reward sustained viewing with surprisingly elegant invitations into Mrozowski’s thoughtful and conceptually rigorous practice. (b. 1981) is an American artist living and working in New York. Working primarily with acrylic paint on stretched linen, Mrozowski renders images that are convincingly legible, yet far from lifelike. Taking natural forms—flowers, fruit, birds—as their subjects, Ryan Mrozowski’s artworks deconstruct and distort familiar motifs from art-historical traditions of still life painting, calling attention to the active role of viewership and inviting interrogation into unexpectedly profound aspects of perception. 

Mrozowski’s paintings often present ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, visual information. Each composition from the ongoing body of artworks, Untitled (Shifted Flowers), depicts an array of flowers transposed over itself. The resulting double-images seem almost to vibrate, as if the paintings were derived from a transitional moment between frames of a film. By foregoing granular detail and occasionally providing paradoxical visual cues, Mrozowski’s images achieve a characteristic balance of depiction and abstraction, resulting in pictures that are—on first glance—urgent, enticing, and beautiful, but which also reward sustained viewing with surprisingly elegant invitations into Mrozowski’s thoughtful and conceptually rigorous practice.