Mural: Erika Ranee

Erika Ranee’s The Wild Things features a selection of mixed-media paintings and works on paper, reimagined in a bold, abstract outdoor mural comprised of sinewy lines, puddles, and smears of translucent bright colors, broken up by flat shapes of opaque and sometimes muddy colors.

Ranee’s colorful abstract paintings are built through a push-pull application of painting, collage, and décollage methods, which create layered surfaces that embody the raw urgency and physicality reminiscent of action painters and art brut, with a density and flatness seen in graffiti art. Yet Ranee’s interlocking bands of paint and paper produce a luminous, translucent quality like the airy expanses of color field painters. Ranee’s observations of nature and family float suspended in the glowing open spaces of the painting with a stained-glass window-like effect.  

Biography

Erika Ranee received a master of fine arts in painting from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor of fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Ranee has held solo shows at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Lesley Heller Gallery, and Freight and Volume (New York), and has participated in group shows including at the Rubin Museum of Art, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, DC Moore Gallery, and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (New York); the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles; Hollis Taggart Gallery in Southport, Connecticut; Platform Project Space, BRIC Art Center, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn); and Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in painting and was awarded studio grants from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Abrons Art Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, Michigan; and Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Ranee lives and works in New York City and is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York.

Header Image:
Erika Ranee
Grandma, 2021 (detail)
Acrylic, shellac, spray paint, and paper collage on canvas
84 × 72 inches

Mural Captions:
(from left to right)
Courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York

We’d Better Get These in Water, 2022 (detail); acrylic, shellac, spray paint and paper collage on wood panel; 96 x 48 inches
We’d Better Get These in Water, 2022 (detail); acrylic, shellac, spray paint and paper collage on wood panel; 96 x 48 inches
On the Mend, 2024 (detail); ink, gouache, gold enamel paint and paper collage on wood panel; 12 × 12 inches
Grandma, 2021 (detail); acrylic, shellac, spray paint, and paper collage on canvas; 84 × 72 inches
Maybe, 2019 (detail); ink and crayon on paper, mounted on wood panel; 12 × 12 inches
Half Measures, 2018 (detail); acrylic, spray paint, shellac, and collage on canvas; 42 × 36 inches