Aspen Art Museum

Bad Lemon (Cloud)

2024

Citrine, quartz, azurite, aquamarine, amazonite, aventurine, truquoise, magnesite, serpentine, prehnite, agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, amethyst druzy, calcite, labradorite, pink opal, tiger eye, dolomite, and fushsite, freshwater pearl, mother of pearl, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene

17.5 × 19 × 17 in   |   44.5 × 48.3 × 43.2 cm

Kindly donated by the artist and KARMA

Estimate: $100,000–$150,000

About this Work

Bad Lemon (Cloud) is carved out of foam and then decorated with over 10,000 beads and semiprecious stones. The process takes over two months to complete. Fruit appears throughout the artist’s practice, symbolizing decadence and decline with their opulence and over-ripeness. While she uses manufactured glass beads to create patches of ripe skin, the more expensive, naturally occurring gemstones are reserved for the rot. “Though the mould is the decay,” she says, “it’s the most alive part”.

The following text appears in the Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2024

Kathleen Ryan is best known for her large-scale sculptures of gem-encrusted decaying fruit. The Bad Fruit series, begun in 2018, makes a tongue-in-cheek, pop-enhanced nod to 17th-century Dutch still lifes. As Ryan explained in an interview with Elephant in 2019, “All the works have something to do with mortality […]—fruit is dying, but mold is thriving.”

In a laborious and painstaking process, the entire surface of each giant polystyrene form is gradually covered with thousands upon thousands of beads and stones. The ripe, juicy flesh of watermelons, lemons and cherries is gradually built up from a dizzying array of glass beads and natural mate- rials, such as quartz, marble, amethyst, amber, freshwater pearl, garnet, lapis lazuli, shells … to name just a few. And then there is the encroaching mold—swarming across the surface, burrowing its way down, rendered in natural gemstones selected for their white or green hue.

In the same interview, Alice Bucknell asked about a possible moralistic reading of the work, to which Ryan responded: “Not really—I’m interested in how people relate to value, and my sculptures are a way of teasing out that relationship and playing with our sense of judgement. In a sense, my work can be read as a critique of wild consumerism and displays of wealth, but it also totally, happily indulges in it. The works are skeptical of the ‘more is more’ attitude, and are also like, well fuck it, more is more.”

Born in Santa Monica, Ryan now lives in New York. Her work is included in numerous notable public collections, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her first major museum survey, featuring around 30 works from 2014 to the present day, is on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany through August 11.

About the Artist

Kathleen Ryan recasts found and handmade objects as spectacular, larger-than-life meditations on consumer society, desire, and the fine line between kitsch and class. These materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent: delicate, sensual grapes are rendered with heavy, utilitarian concrete; mold colonies are composed of semiprecious gemstones. As in Dutch Vanitas paintings, the relics of the everyday—seed pods, jewelry, domestic fixtures, moldy fruit—become tongue-in-cheek allegories for sexuality, decadence, and the cycle of life. Ryan lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Ryan has had solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023); François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2023, 2020, 2017); Karma, New York (2023, 2021); New Art Gallery, Walsall, United Kingdom (2019); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2019); and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2017). Her work is held in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; LAM Museum, Lisse, Netherlands; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; among others.

Ryan’s exhibition KATHLEEN RYAN is currently on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany through August 11, 2024.

How to Bid

All lots will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 17 through August 1.

Bidding on this work takes place at the ArtCrush gala on Friday, August 2nd, at 8pm MT. Absentee and telephone bidding available.

Please contact bid@aspenartmuseum.org for more information, including a condition report.

In the Live Auction, there is no Buyer’s Premium and the difference between the mid-estimate and the winning bid is a tax deductible donation to the museum.

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