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. Ranee received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in painting and attended the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) seminar program at the Bronx Museum and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was an AIRspace resident at Abrons Arts Center (2009-2010) and was awarded a studio grant from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation (2011-12). Her work has been exhibited widely in New York, including the Bronx Museum, the Last Brucennial, the Parlour Bushwick, BravinLee Programs, Storefront Ten Eyck, FiveMyles, TSA Gallery, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, and MAW Gallery. In early 2018 Ranee’s work was featured in a group exhibition at the Southampton Arts Center in Long Island. In the summer of 2018 her work was featured in two concurrent solo exhibitions at Ground Floor Gallery and BRIC Project Room. In early 2019 her work was featured in a solo show at Lesley Heller Gallery and recently in group shows at Freight+Volume, New York City and at Wild Palms in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her work has been mentioned in several publications, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Artforum. Ranee lives and works in 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