VIRGINIA RYAN

The price range of Ryan’s works run from $1250-$15,000. Her recent work is based around a specific female figure, which she calls the "Atopian". This image evolved from a photograph taken of the artist by her daughter at the Lake of Venus on the island of Pantellia in Sicily in 1999. These works have been created in Italy and in Ghana.

Previous work from the Atopian series was shown last year in the International Exhibition "Autoredonna" (where she represented in Australia) at the Palazzo Pasquini, Livorno, Italy and with English artist Sara Bradpiece in the exhibition "Women Looking At Women" in Palazzo Chigi, Vitterbo, Italy.

Further exhibitions of this work will be at Marlene Antico Fine Arts in Sydney, Australia and Chiara Goya Gallery, Melbourne Australia in November 2001. Ryan is also one of the 23 artists chosen from several hundred for the prestigious Hermann's art prize to open in Sydney at Sherman galleries in April 2001.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

For information on purchasing the work below of Ryan's work please e-mail Carole: atelierart@aol.com or call Carole at 917-686-8498.

"Levitation 2", Mixed Media, 33" X 17" $2000.	"Levitation 3", Mixed Media, 33" X 17" $2000.		"Levitation 1", Mixed Media, 33" X 17" In the Art Collection of Carole Jones.

"Female Study" (Yellow Noon 1), from Atopian Series, 2000, Mixed Media, 34" X 36" $2800.	"Female Study" (Yellow Noon 2), from Atopian Series, 2000, Mixed Media 34" X 36" $2800.
	"Female Study 1", from Atopian Series, 2001, Print AP, 40" X 32" $1600.	"Female Study 2", from Atopian Series, 2001, Print AP, 40" X 32" $1600.

'Women looking at Women'

"The bodies painted by Virginia Ryan can be deeply disturbing- monumental bodies with a suggestion of facial features recalling, on occasions, the painter Munch.
What are these bodies doing, these bodies of women, these figures which might appear to be basking under the hot midday sun?
They are doing absolutely nothing, one could even doubt that there exists within them any form of life at all. One could look for evidence of death, for example, embodied in a certain bloated quality, as if they had been drowned. Or, on the other hand, one can simply imagine that they are overwhelmed by sleep, weighed down by the heat of that very sun and have lost all consciousness.
If we look more closely, however, we might discover that these women are in fact levitating, rising up without losing their substance (unlike Yves Klein's Anthropometrics which may come to mind), suspended in a space which is positively radiating, a space of accession and of control.
These works, compact and most original as a series, recuperate some suggestion of shamanic qualities, perhaps as a distant reference to the Aboriginal cultures of her native Australia these are mysterious works which define and incarnate female power, a potential body to inhabit the shoes so constant in her previous works".

Martina Corgnati, Milan - 2000, for exhibition 'Autoredonna'
(Palazzo Pasquilini, Casiglionecello, Italy)

"It is the female figure, a great 'divine body' which is the protagonist of the canvases and drawings in which Virginia Ryan repeats a sequence of 'Portraits of the artists as an Atopian'- bodies whose immobile suspension in a deflagration of time and space, and become a clamorous sign of the extreme nature and contradictions inherent in the female human condition.
Here body substance, flesh and veins, enters into a symbolic symbiosis of intoxication with the 'sacred liquids', the 'live blood', of 'drinking at the source', set against the blinding yellow of the sun".

Anna Cocchetti, catalogue for exhibition "MM ANNO DiVino"
(Palazzo Balleani, Jesi - Jolly Hotel, Rome 2001).