David Ryan

Born in 1956, David Ryan is a visual artist and writer also involved in contemporary music. The abstract artist explores issues around sound and image, the many histories of modernism, and the possibilities of cross-disciplinarity.

David Ryan’s Early Career and Style

David studied at Liverpool and Coventry Polytechnics and received a travelling German Scholarship to Hamburg, Lubeck, and Berlin. He obtained his PhD by publication at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, in 2010. He is now an Associate Professor in Fine Art at the same institution, with research interests traversing the fields of painting, video and music. David gleans inspiration from the intersection between sound and image and musicality and imagery. The resulting works are hybrid colour studies, demonstrating new ways of exploring the crossover between contemporary art and sonic contexts.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions have included Crossing Abstraction 1 (2009, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin), After Image, (2013, Emerson Gallery, Berlin) and Crossing Abstraction 2 (2012, Kunsthaus Erfurt and Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt). More recent exhibitions include June Mostra (2016, British School at Rome), In Nomine Lucis (2017, Santa Maria Della Scala Museum, Siena), Ex-Roma (2017, APT Gallery), Granular (2018, University of Greenwich), and Imagining Architecture (2018, IsdaT, Toulouse). David has presented his music and video work at numerous festivals, including a video collaboration with composer Nicola Sani at the Venice Biennale (2015). In 2016, he was an Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome and, in 2020, a judge for the Franco Evangelisti International Prize for Composition, Rome.

Curatorial Projects

In 2015, David curated a large-scale exhibition, Drawing Towards Sound, looking at the relationship between drawing and musical notation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich. He curated At the Point of Gesture (2013, Turps Gallery and 2015, Wimbledon Space). He has also collaborated with Benet Spencer and The Undersides of Practice, APT Gallery (2020).