Purple Art
[January 26 2015]
Ryder Ripps “Ho” at Postmasters Gallery, New York
Ryder Ripps first solo exhibition, “Ho”, features large scale oil paintings, portraits once removed, derived from the Instagram of model Adrianne Ho (300,000 followers)
Ripps (6,000 followers) transforms self-portraits Adrianne Ho posts online into expressive, highly distorted pictures. Ho’s carefully staged, posed and styled photos are digitally processed, then painted. In creating striking, warped images Ripps strains techniques that are commonplace in the fashion industry to make models appear more “attractive” to the point of abstraction.
Abstract passages referencing the heroic gestures of the Action Painters are generated through fingers moving across the decidedly unheroic touchscreen— the new site of aggression and anxiety in the age of the “virtual male gaze”, where the archetypal macho painter has been emasculated. Photo Elise Gallant
