Mary Ryan Gallery at the ADAA Art Show 2024

Roy Lichtenstein was a great admirer of Claude Monet, whose famed water lily paintings provided the inspiration for Water Lilies with Willows, created through a unique process of screenprinting enamel on stainless steel. In 1986, he began working with Donald Saff, an artist and engineer running an innovative print studio. According to Saff, Lichtenstein was interested in executing a “play on the idea of movement and transformation that was so vital to Monet. … [Roy] wanted to use that process to deal with how Monet used water in a more physical manner, by doing something that would reflect and break up the light into spectral colors.”

Andy Warhol took the world by storm in 1962 with his series of Campbell’s Soup paintings, in which he elevated the humble can of soup, which could be found in any supermarket, into a fine work of art. In 1968, he revisited the theme with his Campbell’s Soup I silkscreen series, creating 10 different works depicting individual soup flavors, including the classic chicken noodle. Even more than the earlier series of paintings, the mechanical reproduction of the silkscreening process closely mirrored the mass production of food products in the United States. Warhol said, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”

Fascinated by the complex layers and interconnections of our world, Julie Mehretu is an artist whose work lends itself naturally to printmaking. In these three Corner of Lake and Minnehaha images, Mehretu screenprints three layers of energetic marks over a news photograph she cropped, flipped, blurred, and enlarged. Each layer is screenprinted using subtle variations of black, causing them to flow into one another as they emerge from Mehretu’s abstract, photographic ground.

In the mid-1960s, Alex Katz began a prolific career in printmaking, producing more than 400 editions of lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, woodcuts, and linoleum cuts. Chance (Darinka) is a 33-color silkscreen, meticulously crafted in muted tones of gray, mauve, and pink. Wearing a stylish swimsuit, the figure is shown in a playful pose with a beachball. The polish of this print alludes to the slick style of fashion advertisements. The larger-than-life size of this work evokes a billboard. Katz said, “I love the scale of billboards, the romance of billboards, and the bluntness of them.”

Ariel 2 is part of a set of print portraits that portray Ariel Veith, one of Katz’s many muses in New York City. This silkscreen is striking in its visual simplicity; composed of smooth fields of peachy oranges, Katz uses a soft, reduced palette to achieve the graphic quality of his overall composition. In this work, Katz chose not to capture Ariel’s entire head, instead just a close-up image of her eyes, nose and lips. The tightly cropped composition lends the work a photographic spontaneity. A pioneer of Pop art, Katz frequently creates visually minimalistic, yet rhetorically enigmatic work. Ariel 2 is, as Katz explains, “an image that is so simple you can’t avoid it, and so complicated you can’t figure it out.”

Yvonne Jacquette is known for her nocturnal cityscapes and breathtaking aerial perspectives, a subject matter that gripped her imagination for much of her career. The artist sharpened her signature bird’s eye perspective by chartering planes from New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, working from the Empire State Building, and using empty office spaces and enclosed decks of the World Trade Center to create elevated views of the city.

Lorna Simpson’s Double Portrait, a silkscreen print on two felt panels, is a continuation of the artist’s collage series based on advertisements found in Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1930s through 1970s. Simpson regards these publications as important archives of American life. In the work, the portraits of two women taken from an Ebony advertisement make reference to the before and after shots found in many magazines of the time. In the ad, the women act out two different emotional states, much in the way that performers bring characters to life on stage. Double Portrait is the first work from this collage series to be printed on felt, a material which the artist has experimented with since the mid-1990s.

Kara Walker is known for subverting traditional art historical subjects and replacing them with African American narratives. In her prints and paintings of contorted black silhouettes, Walker confronts her viewers with the violent history of slavery in America and the enduring relevance of its memory today.

To create her silhouettes, Walker reprises the tradition of shadow portraits that rose in popularity in the Antebellum and Victorian eras and applies them to the realities of slavery, thus reframing the narrative to showcase the graphic truths of this grim chapter in American history. In African/American, Walker describes the shackled figure tumbling through history as “your essentialist-token slave maiden in midair.”

Author/illustrator Jean de Brunhoff created the Babar books, which quickly became popular and have been in continuous publication since 1931. The Babar books began as a bedtime story that Jean’s wife Cécile de Brunhoff invented for their children, Mathieu, Thierry, and Laurent. The boys liked the story of the little elephant who left the jungle for a city resembling Paris so much so that they took it to their father, a skilled painter of portraits and landscapes, and asked him to illustrate it. Jean turned it into a picture book, with text, which became The Story of Babar. Six more titles followed before Jean de Brunhoff died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.

All of the original illustrations and related materials for 6 of the 7 Jean de Brunhoff books (published 1931-1938) are in museum collections including the Morgan Library, NY; Houghton Library, Harvard University, MA; the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, CA; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Laurent de Brunhoff was the author and illustrator of over 60 Babar books. At just thirteen years old, Laurent made his first Babar illustration for the cover of his late father Jean de Brunhoff’s final Babar book. Laurent returned to Babar in 1946, and in the nearly eight decades since, his love for Babar, his art, and family stories have touched millions across the globe.

In the catalog for his first exhibition at Mary Ryan Gallery in 1987, Laurent wrote, “I make each page of my book like a painting, with its own organization, rhythm, and color harmony. From these notes I work and dream, going, as children do, from the real to the imaginary.”

Laurent trained as an abstract painter in the 1950s, and this is reflected in his colorful and expressive Babar drawings. His last Babar book was Babar’s Guide to Paris (2017) – a fitting return to the city where Laurent was born for his final Babar story – which is where Each Café is Different was published. This work depicts a lovely outdoor Parisian cafe complete with an elephant waiter carrying a tray of drinks.