Veronica Ryan
Opening on October 16th, Paula Cooper Gallery will present an important historical installation by Veronica Ryan, Archaeology of the Black Sun 1956–2002 (2003), alongside new works. The exhibition follows the artist’s first survey, Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects, organized by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, and currently on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. In the spring of 2026, Ryan will have a one-person exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK.
Ryan’s sculpture initiates an intimate and expansive dialogue around loss and retrieval, inviting inquiry into cultural, social and environmental concerns. Everyday items are transformed through hand-stitching, crocheting, or casting in bronze and ceramic, imbuing them with both personal narratives and universal psychological associations. Ryan arranges and groups objects with care during installation, provoking new conversations: ornate sculptures inhabit round lace doilies; ceramic, glass, and found objects are staged on industrial metal cabinets; plants cast in bronze hang on the wall. Foregoing plinths, Ryan challenges preconceived notions of sculptural display, deliberately presenting the works in an unconventional yet familiar manner.
The exhibition’s title, Retrieval, refers to the cultural inheritance and personal and collective memory embedded in specific objects. Himalayan salt crystals and bandages offer alternative methods for healing in ancient cultures and modern-day practices, while plastic bottles recast in ceramic emphasize ecological concerns. Materials function metaphorically in Ryan’s work. Seeds, pods and fruits are re-conceptualized to communicate larger questions around growth and migration, while containers and modular units gesture to fracture and displacement. Earlier this year, Ryan revisited a 2011 statement about her work: “Inside and outside merge, which is inside and which is outside. Where are the boundaries? Liminal spaces, time place and locations. Reality and outside of reality. Definable and not defined. A shrine, alcoves, perhaps.”[1]
Presented for the first time in over twenty years, Archaeology of the Black Sun 1956-2002 is an installation of over one-hundred objects made and collected by Ryan. The title references Julia Kristeva’s post-structural psychoanalytic study of melancholy from different paradigms, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987), and plays on the varied linguistic interpretations that title offers. Ryan was intrigued by Kristeva’s dispassionate, analytical writing about sensitive and emotional topics, such as trauma, depression and abjection. The dates in the artwork’s title refer to the year Ryan was born and the year the work was completed. The work is composed of diverse materials and objects pinned to the wall, serving as metaphors for her life experience and interior world.
[1] Veronica Ryan, artist statement for The Weather Inside, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, 2011; quoted by Ryan in artist talk, The Society for Contemporary Art, Chicago, May 21, 2025.
