Mary Ryan Gallery

“I don’t have any plans when I start a landscape; it is usually very subconscious and intuitive. I merely play around with color and texture, whether it’s a work on paper, or a painting, and then something clicks and I start to organize it into a landscape that doesn’t necessarily identify with a specific place.”

— Artist Shara Hughes on her landscapes

Pictured: Shara Hughes, Finding Balance (2020); etching

Craig McPherson’s Yankee Stadium at Night (1983) is a tour-de-force mezzotint that reflects a view of New York’s old Yankee Stadium from the artist’s studio in Washington Heights.

Recalling film noir aesthetics, the print denotes a cinematic feel that emanates from an atmospheric light that glows in McPherson’s horizon line. There is no deeper black in printmaking than the one achieved by mezzotint, resulting in the lush, velvety feel of this work.

Happy first day of spring!

Pictured: Ethel Mars, In the Park (1904); woodcut

In Yellow Poppies, September 12, 2013, Donald Sultan recreates the impossible blackness and rich texture of his paintings by using silkscreen with enamel inks and flocking. The fine texture of the flocking – seen in the fuzzy, black centers of the poppies he pictures – absorbs light while lending the print an intriguing, tactile quality.

Eli Jacobi is best known for his remarkable vignettes into Depression era life in New York City.

In 1935, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the artist began documenting life in the Bowery, an impoverished Lower East Side neighborhood infamous for its poverty and dereliction. In this 1940 linocut, Jacobi depicts locals dining at a bustling former eatery in the Bowery, “The Busy Bee”. 

Pictured: The Busy Bee (1940); 10 x 13 inches

Happy Valentine’s Day from Mary Ryan Gallery!

Pictured: Margo Humphrey, The Kiss (1994); etching with collage

Mary Ryan Gallery will be closed today, February 13, due to the inclement weather. We will reopen to the public tomorrow, February 14.

Pictured: Fairfield Porter, Islands – Maine (c. 1966); 9 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches

Maira Kalman is an artist, author/illustrator, and designer known for her playful and witty illustrations. Her work has been featured in her own bestselling books and publications such as The New York Times and New Yorker.

Kalman often focuses on seminal artists and writers in her work. Here, the artist depicts Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, famous for her powerful prose, trailblazing activism, and aloof, mysterious demeanor.

Throughout the 1920s, artist Louis Lozowick was fascinated by the architectural advancements of the modern American city: cable-stayed bridges, elevated railways, and skyscrapers, to name a few.

With an extensive background in Precisionism, Lozowick was initially drawn to the striking scales, geometries, and perspectival opportunities of picturing New York’s soaring skyscrapers. In Backyards of Broadway (1926), the artist focuses on a west-facing view from a building on Broadway. Lozowick carefully records the monumental planes and bold shadows formed by the city’s evolving skyline. In the foreground, a swarm of pedestrians can be seen walking on a sunlit sidewalk, highlighting the awesome scale of these contemporary feats of architecture. 

Backyards of Broadway is currently on view at Mary Ryan Gallery.

Known for challenging the division between fine art and mass culture, Jasper Johns frequently incorporated recognizable imagery such as targets, the American flag, and other everyday objects into his work. Savarin 6 (Blue) (1979) features a Savarin-brand coffee can filled with paintbrushes, a frequent motif of Johns’s prints that originated with his 1960 bronze sculpture Painted Bronze. This image recurs in Johns’s work as a metaphor for the artist’s working life. Here, the paintbrushes merge with the urgent, vertical marks in the print’s background.

Other impressions of Savarin 6 (Blue) can be found in the collections of The Broad, CA; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; and Walker Art Center, MN.

Currently on view at the gallery: David Hockney’s landmark print, Lithographic Water made of lines, crayon and two blue washes without green wash (1978-80).

Hockney’s interest in swimming pools was sparked by his 1966 move to the United States; the artist was immediately struck by the shimmer of the California sun on the many backyard pools that populate Los Angeles.

Years later, Hockney revisited this subject matter at masterprinter Ken Tyler’s printing workshop in New York. The artist remarked, “Ken (Tyler) had a swimming pool in the garden and every day we would have lunch by the swimming pool, every lunch time I would have a swim. I kept looking at the swimming pool; and it’s a wonderful subject, water, the light on the water… every time you look at the surface, you look through it, you look under it…”

Andy Warhol began depicting hibiscus flowers in the summer of 1964. Sixty years later, his Flowers continue to be some of his most popular subjects: bold, lush, and vibrant. Unleashing his playful style in a frenzy of color, the artist superimposes a variety of hibiscus blooms on a field of bright, green grass. With these screenprints, produced in 1970, Warhol reinvents the still life, presenting his flowers to a modern, energetic, pop generation.

(1) Flowers (F. & S. II.65)
(2) Flowers (F. & S. II.67)
(3) Flowers (F. & S. II.72)

Currently on view at Mary Ryan Gallery: work by Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Philip Guston, Donald Sultan, and more. Stop by to see the full selection of historic works on paper!

The gallery and ADAA are pleased to announce that Mary Ryan will assume the role of Chair of The Art Show Committee, following Susan Sheehan’s tenure of exceptional leadership over the past three years. Mary will hold the position for the next three editions of The Art Show, through 2026.



Image credit: Mike Vitelli, 2024

George Miyasaki gained acclaim as a brilliant colorist in the late-1950s and early-1960s for his Abstract Expressionist paintings and prints. In the 1980s, he began incorporating layered paper in his compositions, creating works that at once balanced abstraction, gentle- and hard-edged shapes, delicate lines, and shadows of paint. Through spontaneous layers of torn and painted paper, Miyasaki’s Centerpoint (pictured here) is both drawing and collage, allowing for a unique sense of texture.

One of the most notable aspects of Kara Walker’s art is her use of the silhouette. This simple form allows Walker to create intricate narratives that confront the complexities of race, gender, and power dynamics. To create these bold silhouettes, the artist reprises the tradition of shadow portraits that rose in popularity during the Antebellum and Victorian eras. Walker describes this particular figure in her linocut African/American as “your essentialist-token slave maiden in midair.”

African/American is currently on view at Mary Ryan Gallery.

American-born artist Clark Fay spent most of his career in Paris and London, capturing urban scenes of the interwar period in the two European capitals. While in Paris, Fay worked extensively with master printer Edmond Desjobert, and his work became influenced by the German artist George Grosz. This print is from Fay’s portfolio of lithographs with chine collé, La Belle Poule: A l’Enseigne des Mille Pertuis, in which the artist depicts the seedy underbelly of urban nightlife.

Yvonne Jacquette’s woodcuts depict monochromatic nightscapes that render familiar cities mysterious. These nocturnes are reduced yet all-encompassing, simultaneously intimate and remote. Executed from several, elevated vantage points, many are composite images in which the artist mixes different perspectives and architectural elements.

In 1967, May Stevens began painting her “Big Daddy” figure—a smug, fleshy, bald and bespectacled middle-aged figure, often naked and accompanied by a bulldog, loosely based on an image of her father.

Born out of Stevens’s passionate involvement in both the antiwar and feminist movements, Big Daddy was to Stevens, “…a relative of mine who represented to me an authoritarian and closed attitude towards the world. It was a middle-American attitude towards culture, towards politics, towards Black people, and towards Jews. He was a person who stopped thinking when he was twenty and hadn’t opened his mind to anything since.”

Pictured: US Marshal, (c. 1970); screenprint

On view at the gallery as a part of our presentation of original Babar illustrations and silkscreens: Study for “You can work in the lighthouse...” from Babar’s Mystery. Created by Laurent de Brunhoff in 1978, this original study features handwritten text from the beloved children’s book. Mary Ryan Gallery has been the exclusive representative of all Babar published watercolor illustrations, studies, and drawings by Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff for three decades.

Follow the linkinbio to view more available — some never-before-seen — original Babar works by Laurent de Brunhoff.

Donald Sultan is recognized internationally for his inventive still lifes that tease dichotomies such as realism and abstraction, delicacy and grit. Rich in pigment and texture, Sultan’s 2018 Lemon silkscreens flatten lemons to their essential silhouettes, expanding on his iconic body of lemon still lifes with a rough, tar-like finish.

Death Seizes a Woman is from the last series of prints that Käthe Kollwitz ever made—a series of eight lithographs about death.  According to the Museum of Modern Art, ten years before completing the series, Kollwitz had noted in her diary, “I must do the prints on Death. Must, must, must!” 

Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Germany; Library of Congress, DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany, among others.

On view at Mary Ryan Gallery: Opened Eye (1983) by Herbert Gentry.

Gentry executed his 1983 etching and aquatint Opened Eye using his signature painting style; the thick lines that make up heads, bodies, and eyes swirl together organically. They appear more as unconscious reminiscences of a presence rather than actual silhouettes. They are alternatively the subject and background of the bustling activity that Gentry projects onto the paper. These flittering figures are a testament to the constant importance of people and human connections in Gentry’s life and career.

On this day...

January 7 is a 1993 aquatint print by Alex Katz featuring his most frequent muse—his wife Ada—walking through a wintry forest landscape. Composed of bold fields of pigment that simplify both setting and sitter, January 7 exemplifies Katz’s graphic approach to landscape and portraiture.

In Laurent de Brunhoff’s What Could Be Better Than Skiing in Winter?, Babar hits the slopes under a falling snow with Celeste, Cousin Arthur, Pom, Alexander and Flora. As a young boy in the 1930s, de Brunhoff grew up skiing in the Swiss Alp with his father Jean de Brunhoff, his mother Cecile de Brunhoff, and his brothers.

What Could Be Better Than Skiing in Winter is part of a suite of 4 silkscreens, Four Seasons, based on illustrations for Babar’s busy year and published by Mary Ryan Gallery. The full suite, accompanied by a selection of other original Babar prints and watercolor illustrations, is currently on view at the gallery.

Happy New Year from Mary Ryan Gallery!

The gallery is now open for regular hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00am–6:00pm.

Pictured: Marion Greenwood, New Year’s Eve (1942); lithograph