Matthew Ronay - Press Release

We have so much, too much that we can buy, yet the basic labor of doing, the making with our own hands is what enlivens us, makes us feel human. . . . I will not let my fingers be reduced to button pushing and switch flicking. There are no tools in my baking kit more useful than my hands, and as long as I can use them to shape bread I will. -Dan Lepard

Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce Matthew Ronay's second solo exhibition at the gallery. Ronay explores the infinite difference embodied by an array of materials and sculptural methods. Ronay's work is the product of an osmotic process accessing the ether of cultural production. Like much great work, Ronay's sculpture is formed by neither reconfiguration nor negation and is able to manifest itself as mysterious and new.

Ronay's works express the primacy of the handmade object. The artist reminds us that objects are not merely goods to be consumed or representations of a material culture of mass production, but rather, are sites of projection: acting as totems embodying and reflecting desire and our own capacity to imagine. Instead of seeing myths as an earnest, scientific effort to make the world knowable, Ronay's work explores myth and ritual to render the world less fathomable and more magical.

In a moment of particularly heightened talk of plans and solutions, of issues that can be enumerated and resolved, Ronay's work invites the viewer to embrace complexity and the challenge of everything not being figured out. In an atmosphere rife with promises to salve fear and anxiety, the artist takes a seemingly defiant stand against a rhetoric of certainty and conviction that is at worst dishonest and at best delusional. Instead of shrouding a narrative in a puzzle of signs to be decoded and understood, the sculptures in this exhibition probe the generative space between object and viewer. It is within this space that Ronay seeks not to transmit meaning held trapped in the work, but rather, to generate an experience simultaneously unstructured and exhilarating in its openness.

Ronay's work should be seen as an experiment to engender change. It is perhaps through embracing the unconscious that it can be transformed and transgressed.


Matthew Ronay was born in 1976 in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1998 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2000. He currently lives and works in New York. In 2006 Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, hosted a major one-man presentation of the artist's work, "Goin' Down, Down, Down." Ronay has recently been included in several notable group exhibitions, including "Phantasmania," at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and the traveling exhibition "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" which originated at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Norway.

Matthew Ronay and Nathan Carter make up the sporadically performing band 'The Final Run iNs'. They last appeared at the Vizcaya Gardens in Miami, FL for the 'The Ball of Artists' in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach. Other recent shows include DIRTY BURT'S BUBBLE SPA AND BLUE BAZAAR performed in Los Angeles, CA, at the Mandrake, and HONG KONG RESTAURANT all ages show in New York, NY, at Taxter and Spengemann. Their next show will be as Esther Schipper Galerie, Berlin in 2008.

For more information and images please contact Jeremy Lawson: j.lawson@rosengallery.com