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Kathleen Ryan – museum survey opened at Kistefos
Kathleen Ryan
4 May – 12 October 2025
Nybruket Gallery & Wood Pulp Mill
Kistefos Museum
Kistefos is proud to present the first major museum survey of American sculptor Kathleen Ryan. Following its debut at Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2024, the exhibition opened at Kistefos on 4 May 2025 and is currently on view. Showcasing works from the first decade of Ryan’s artistic practice, the exhibition features twenty-five sculptures displayed across two venues: Nybruket Gallery and the industrial-era Wood Pulp Mill.
Kathleen Ryan has garnered international acclaim for her inventive use of materials, her emotionally resonant forms, and her exploration of themes including decay, desire, excess, and transformation. Monumental in scale and intricately detailed, Ryan’s works often incorporate found objects such as bowling balls, chandelier fittings, or rusted car bonnets, alongside traditional sculptural materials and glittering semi-precious stones and beads.
The exhibition brings together several major bodies of work: hand-modelled ceramic birds perched on salvaged objects, reclining concrete Bacchante sculptures that allude to classical mythology, oversized cast iron calipers suspended mid-measurement with delicate, jewel-like contents, and Ryan’s iconic “Bad Fruit” sculptures – decadent fruits corrupted by passages of shimmering gemstone mould. These works interrogate cycles of value and decline, while hinting at regeneration and the imaginative potential of re-use.
Ryan’s practice is deeply material-focused, juxtaposing the synthetic and the organic, the mass-produced and the handcrafted, and imbues each component with symbolic and cultural meaning. Her sculptures are layered with time: the labour of making overlaid onto the histories of the objects themselves.
The exhibition is curated by Jasper Sharp and Kate Smith.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition presents 25 sculptures by Kathleen Ryan, created between 2014 and 2024. It will run for the entire Kistefos season, from 4 May to 12 October 2025, and is shown across two venues: Nybruket Gallery and Tresliperiet.
This marks the first time a single exhibition has occupied both of these former industrial spaces, two of several gallery venues at Kistefos.
The exhibition brings together four major bodies of work, such as: hand-modelled ceramic bronze birds perched on found objects in solemn clusters, reclining concrete Bacchante sculptures that allude to classical mythology, oversize cast iron calipers suspended mid-measurement with delicate, jewel-like contents, and Ryan’s iconic “Bad Fruit” sculptures – decadent fruits corrupted by shimmering gemstone mould. Several pieces are being exhibited publicly for the first time in this exhibition tour.
About Kathleen Ryan
Kathleen Ryan was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1984 and lives and works in New Jersey. She graduated with a BA from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, in 2006, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2014.
Collections include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; MOCA LA, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Exhibitions include Bacchante, Theseus Temple, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2017); Cultivator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2019); New Art Gallery, Walsall, England (2019); Aldrich Projects: Kathleen Ryan: Head and Heart, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023); Spotlight: Kathleen Ryan, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (2024); and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2024). In 2020, Ryan was awarded the Rosa Schapire Art Prize by the Friends of the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Materials List
Ryan’s works are known for their rich material diversity, often combining the organic, the industrial, and the decorative. Materials featured in this exhibition include: Acrylic, agate, airstream camper, aluminium, amazonite, aquamarine, bowling balls, brass, car parts, carnelian, chain, chandelier, clay, concrete, fishing rods, freshwater pearls, glass, industrial plastics, iron, pewter, jasper, lapis lazuli, lead, marble, mother of pearl, onyx, rope, satellite dish, serpentine, shells, steel, terracotta, tiger eye, vintage beaded plastic fruit, wood.
The use of these materials plays a central role in Ryan’s sculptural language, revealing tensions between value and decay, permanence and impermanence, desire and decline.
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Kistefos was established in 1996 by Norwegian businessman and art collector Christen Sveaas on the former site of his grandfather’s pulp mill. Today, Kistefos offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions, and an expansive sculpture park in scenic surroundings. Every year, Kistefos presents new art exhibitions by highly recognized national and international artists in its two galleries, The Twist and Nybruket Gallery. The Twist has won several prizes for its cutting-edge design and is a gallery, a bridge, and a sculpture, all in one.
