Erika Ranee

Erika Ranee’s How Are Things on My End features mixed-media paintings and works on paper completed in the last decade. These bold, abstract tableaus are comprised of sinewy lines, puddles, and smears of translucent bright colors, broken up by flat shapes of opaque and sometimes muddy colors reminiscent of Matisse’s use of cut paper to form compositions. Each picture is a mix of the soft and hard edges of the natural and industrial world. Ranee observes and inserts into her fluid compositions a synthesis of the cacophony of city and country life, as well as the gatherings and seclusion of her daily life.  

Ranee pokes fun at selfie culture and the narcissism inherent with being an artist and making art about oneself through the titling of her exhibition and artworks. In the show title, How Are Things on My End, Ranee switches “your” with “me.” In doing so, Ranee says, “[it] flips the switch on typical caring comments” and serves as a “play on selfie/me/vain culture.”

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. In the painting I Wonder if I Know What You Mean, 2022, an ethereal gradient of red-orange to yellow-green radiates behind a field of flat white shapes overlaid with a web of gray and blue lines, as well as drawings of plants and the artist’s niece’s braids. 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
I Wonder if I Know What You Mean, 2022 (detail)
Acrylic, shellac, spray paint, and paper collage on canvas
84 × 72 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York

Image Gallery:
(from left to right)
Rock Eater, 2019; acrylic, shellac, ink, and spray paint on canvas; 14 × 11 inches; courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York
Grandma, 2021; acrylic, shellac, spray paint, and paper collage on canvas; 84 × 72 inches; courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York
My Pet, 2022; acrylic, shellac, gouache, flashe, and paper collage on canvas; 42 × 36 inches; courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York