Kathleen Ryan: Souvenir / Karma, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Kathleen Ryan: Souvenir
November 8 - December 20, 2025
Karma, Los Angeles, CA
An engine beats like a heart, or maybe a heart purrs like an engine. Under the hood, an organ, a pit, perhaps a pearl. Crack open a piece of fruit like a geode and find it cavernous, rotting and iridescent. Laden with a bowling ball, a token of love is too heavy to lift, let alone carry into eternity. Somewhere soft to dream or toss and turn becomes a landscape of jewels, an archway, a slice of bread made inedible by mold or scalding heat. Material, shape, symbol, image—nothing is too solid to destabilize. In her sculptures, Kathleen Ryan pulls everyday objects to the brink of uncanniness, revealing new formal and associative possibilities in turn. Following her first institutional survey at Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kistefos Museum, the nine sculptures in Souvenir present a cross-section of the motifs, techniques, and conceptual decisions integral to Ryan’s entire practice. Desire, novelty, childhood, fantasy, love, and death—the blood and guts of life—are in play here, recast in familiar forms that both are and are not what they seem.
Souvenir debuts two new bodies of work. The first is a trio of cast-concrete peaches, their pits supplanted by engines. Their polished interiors and unfinished exteriors evoke the contrasting textures of the fruit’s flesh and skin. Heartthrob (all works 2025) is a Ford F-150’s powertrain embedded in a two-ton slice of solid concrete. Partially submerged tangles of wires, rusting cylinders and pistons, and other truck innards feed into its belly like arteries. Heartbreaker and Wild Heart iterate on the same sculptural logic. The latter’s sleek, half-exposed core is culled from a Harley Davidson, its twin cylinders echoing the two-sided structure of that titular organ. These sculptures could be alien or primordial, but their most visceral resemblance is to the human body—itself linked to automobiles through both language (valves, chambers, and so on) and, as Ryan reminds us, form. The peaches’ curves and dimples are stylized, “more emoji than produce aisle,” per the artist. But, as these sculptures attest, symbols drag their previous contexts along with them as they shapeshift. Heartbreaker, Heartthrob, and Wild Heart pulse with all of these intertwined valences: organ, body, car, fruit, pixelated and pop cultural symbols of desire.
Keep reading here: https://karmakarma.org/exhibitions/kathleen-ryan-2025_la/press-release/