Ryan McGinley

The artist Ryan McGinley pops up every 4 months or so in the past 2 years. I am familiar with his more romantic and pubescent series simply called 'Photographs' in which an entourage of handsome young thangs go romping through fields and waterfalls. Quintessentially roadtrip in nature they incite that liberated feeling only nudity in the great outdoors can bring as well as a definite eroticism.

















His other series, Moonmilk, takes the figures into less liberating and more endangering settings of stalactites and tight craggy crevices. It gives precedence to the surroundings and the tricks of light and reserves to the figure to a unit of measurement.










And now his poetic sense of framing and decontextualization is brought to the Winter Olympics. It is a far less machismo portrayal of the atheltes and really shows the winter games in a much more spiritual light. Some pictures are devoid of a landscape alltogether and simply have the athletes in a state of flight, seemingly out of control and twisting like rag dolls. I really appreciate this different perspective on the heights of athleticism. It reminds me in fact of the work that David LaChappelle did some years ago called 'Awakened' but only technically really.