Matthew Ronay's weird and wonderful body of work grows
2 min read · 27 Jun 2023
Matthew Ronay, (detail) The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode (2022). Copyright the artist. Courtesy of Casey Kaplan, New York
Matthew Ronay is on the HENI News radar after the US artist presented his eccentric, multi-colored sculptures in a prestigious Dallas museum and in Hong Kong.
Matthew Ronay's HENI Score—a unique artist sentiment—has risen a spectacular 200%, boosted by his mid-career solo show at the prestigious Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, closely followed by his solo show in Hong Kong with Galerie Perrotin.
An artist’s HENI score amalgamates data such as auction sales, NFT sales, news and social media mentions, gallery shows and museum exhibitions.
Market
Ronay’s surreal sculptures have been offered on the primary market for price points ranging from $12,000 to $300,000 over the past two years. His smaller sculptures and reliefs, or “paintings”, have been priced from $28,000 to $40,000.
The market for the artist is still largely untested at auction, although he first made his mark in solo and group shows in the mid 2000s, including at the now closed Mark Foxx gallery in Los Angeles and when Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, presented the work of living artists.
Shows
Ronay’s solo museum show at the Nasher in 2022 “The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode” included a 7-metre-long sculpture of the same name, his largest work so far. In 2016, he created an installation at the Perez Art Museum Miami in its project space, introducing his whimsical take on bodily functions and cell-like forms to a wider audience of collectors.
His 2023 solo show with Perrotin in Hong Kong, "The Tombs Are Upset," featured his signature, anatomical-looking creations, which he hand carves in wood and paints bright colors. Perrotin has also shown his work in the dealer's Shanghai and Paris spaces.
Matthew Ronay, Reinstantiationizer (2021). Copyright the artist. Courtesy of Casey Kaplan, New York
In 2017, Ronay joined the New York-based gallery Casey Kaplan, which organised its latest solo show of his work in 2021. In Copenhagen, he is represented by Galeri Nils Stærk, which last organised a solo show in 2019.
Ronay’s work has been presented at editions of Art Basel and Frieze.
Profile
Born in Kentucky in 1976, the New York-based artist often bases his work on stream-of-consciousness drawings. The end results have been compared with otherworldly landscapes, futuristic architecture mixed with biomorphic forms and organs suggesting bodily functions.
Sculpture magazine described his solo show at the Perez Museum to “walking through a deserted kindergarten, with ice-cream-colored sculptures strewn around a play area”. The artist explained: “If we think of Minimalism, perhaps of a James Turrell, there is great bravery in making something so incredibly silent whereby you are not really seeing very much at all. I love that, but it is not my will. I want to celebrate the opposite—the maximal, tactile nature of objectness.”
More
To get a deeper understanding of Matthew Ronay’s career visit his HENI Dashboard; a unique graphical data tool illustrating an artist’s auction sales, shows, profiles, mentions and their HENI Score. You can search for any one of the 100,000 Artist Dashboards to quickly appreciate their trajectory as well as sharing via email, text and WhatsApp