Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong, presents “Vertical Color of Sound”, an exhibition by Ryan McGinley. The show is a selection of twelve large-scale photographs taken in his annual summer road trip. This is McGinley’s first solo exhibition in China and his second show with the gallery.

More a director than a documentary maker, the situations in McGinley’s photographs are meticulously orchestrated. Every gesture and each moment is meditated. Despite that, the resultant images still thrive for spontaneity and are reaction to the unexpected. They chronicle the artist’s own generation which is marked by freedom and possibility.

Since 2005, McGinley has been making his three-month road trip across America every summer. Traveling with him and his crew is a young cast of models who frolic in nature during journey. They perform with animal energy and liberation, while McGinley shoots with his camera. McGinley is seeking for dynamic pictures that carry a cinematic scope, in which every shot feels like part of an ongoing action and an activity that continues outside the frame.

Most works selected in this show depict idyllic scenes of pastoral beauty: carefree nudes hurling themselves into a rural landscape, figures staring at the skyline from a ledge or in the midst of a beach, and individual portrayals of different mesmerizing night skies. The lack of clothing along with the utopian landscape has granted the pictures a timeless quality. It is as if the nature has distilled these nude free spirits, leaving the viewers with hints of primitive innocence.

“Soft Confetti” and “Genie” stand out as the firework images, with liquid light that illuminates the night sky and colorizes the entire photographic space. They are McGinley’s records of the subtle nuances of light and atmosphere of the moment, which capture a body that is at the same time displaced by ecstatic bursts of brightness.

Ryan McGinley is a New York-based artist who was raised in New Jersey and moved to the city in 1996. In 2003, at age 25, Ryan McGinley was the youngest artist to receive a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art (“The Kids Are Alright”). McGinley’s work is featured in numerous museum collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has been the subject of monographic exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, MUSAC in Leon, Spain, and MOMA PS1 New York.

Image: © Ryan McGinley
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Perrotin