I AM THAT ‘EYE AM’: Mark Ryden’s Whimsy and Wonder at Perrotin Los Angeles

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload wp-image-1608932 size-full-width" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/P4-Mark-Ryden-by-Christopher-French-1-e1767482788318.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Man in a pastel pink suit stands beside an ornate easel, holding a paint palette and brush. On the canvas is a surreal, wide-eyed doll with voluminous pink hair and a bow, framed in gilded pink. The studio background is entirely pink." width="970" height="970" data-caption='Mark Ryden, the godfather of Pop Surrealism, has built a career with the uncanny, the recondite and the unapologetically kitsch. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photographed by Christopher French. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin</span>’>

In late October, a pageant’s worth of costumed devotees gathered at Perrotin in Los Angeles for the grand opening of Mark Ryden’s solo exhibition, “Eye Am,” which showcased 12 new works by the cult artist. Buccaneers, Pierrot clowns and stag-horned fey wandered the exhibition, examining portraits of coronated Bye-Lo babies, taxidermy arrayed in whimsical mise-en-scènes and the pictorial apotheosis of a yam. It was a scene not too dissimilar from one Ryden might paint—a promenade of the curious and the willfully whimsical—and was one of his own making. A few hours before the opening, the artist posted an image of one of the paintings featured in the exhibition, Sweet Laurette #187—a pale, freckled pixie doll with her chubby hands wrapped around a pair of yams—to his Instagram with a caption reading “Wear a costume!”

Through his work, Ryden offers rabbit holes and tightly packed wonderlands and an invitation to be in on the joke. Where some see paraphernalia, Ryden sees psalms. In the recently closed “Eye Am,” he presents his own agreement on spiritual peace, or at the very least, a scripture on how to obtain it. Ryden’s scripture is not one written with words or even with intention, but with feeling.

“My work grows organically rather than from a deliberate plan or hidden system,” Ryden told Observer. “I love how viewers can possibly stumble across details they didn’t notice at first, because that mirrors the way I experience making the work. There are shifts, moments of recognition and surprises, and the painting can become a journey of discovery.”

Kitschmeister, lowbrow luminary and indisputable Pop Surrealism pioneer, Ryden has become something of a cultural touchstone over the course of his decades-long career. His practice spans album covers, Barbie dolls, ballet set and costume design and variety show automatons, all of which generally fall into Ryden’s signature carnivalesque style. His rose-tinted dreamscapes emanate with a morbid, yet utopian symmetry. Debutantes boast ballgowns made of meat cuts, cherubic children fill their teacups with Eucharist wine, cosmopolitan cloud cuckoo lands populated by the wide-eyed and the woebegone.

Creatura is one such dreamscape. A young woman kneels in a glade, surrounded by all manner of flora and fauna—extinct, mythical and spiritual. A large pulmonate, an anthropomorphic cat, a roaming sea urchin, a miniature pink elephant, a pair of bumblebees and numerous ineffable hybrids all gaze reverently at a stellated tetrahedron, or a Merkaba. The Merkaba—an implement of spiritual ascension with ancient and occult lineage—has had previous appearances in Ryden’s work. “Geometry has always carried a spiritual charge for me,” the artist said. “I am drawn to sacred geometry because it is the intersection of science and spirituality, which feels very natural to who I am.” For years, the artist integrated Platonic solids into his work.

In this way, Creatura happily disrupts taxonomy and the boundaries between animal and insect, mammal and reptile, between real and imagined. “I don’t let the literal confines of nature dictate what can exist in my own painting,” Ryden said. “Some of the critters are drawn from the real world, which is always amazing because they already feel almost invented. I just follow my own flow and see what appears.”

In one small but marvelous work, The Sentinel, the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey sits in a verdant, alpine meadow. It stares with a single, wizened eye at a bumblebee—a recurring figure in Ryden’s work—and the two lock gazes, in a moment of cosmic synchronicity. Several of Ryden’s figurative motifs hold a deeper meaning or convey themes and ideas to which he frequently returns. For example, Ryden has previously expressed his love for bees in a 2022 Instagram post announcing the inclusion of a “Barbie Bee” in his limited collection with Mattel. “Without pollinators, the cycle would break and life as we know it would end,” Ryden wrote. “They are reminders of the delicate connections between all life forms on Earth.” Ryden’s work foregrounds this fragile balance, acknowledging that it is this interdependence that sustains us.

Ryden—who has drawn criticism for his use of gore and sacrilege—finds catharsis in exploring the implicit carnage of the Eucharist. In Communion #183, Christ plays sommelier to a gauntlet of young girls in communion dresses, pouring Holy Wine from his stigmata into their glass chalices. This unfolds in what is an otherwise bucolic scene: cherry blossoms bloom, cumulus clouds part, flower buds open unto the sunlight and a lake glistens in the distance.

“I was thinking about the inherently absurd act of communion itself in this painting,” Ryden said. “The idea of literally eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood has always struck me as strange and difficult to understand. The Bible says this should be taken literally rather than symbolically, and that feels even more disturbing and macabre. By contrast, I find spiritual meaning in connection to the natural world around us. It is there in the passing of the seasons and the interconnectedness of all living things. That is where I feel a sense of awe and spiritual inspiration.”

Ryden paints with technical virtuosity and conceptual clarity; in short, he lets intuition guide him. A maneuver of Ryden’s intuition, Eye Am #181 is a paralyzing work, echoing with skillful dexterity and a refusal of direct interpretation. It features what could be a yam or a pineal gland or a higher self lying wide-eyed in a bed, staring at the name of the exhibition, “EYE AM.”

Ryden regards the mystery behind his work as sacred, a vehicle to spiritual enlightenment. He occasionally works off the Jungian hypothesis, incorporating some images from pop culture, those that preceded it and those that exist outside of it entirely. He marries the phenomenal to the subconscious, the absurd to the eerie and through it all creates worlds beyond explanation. When asked about what the yam in Eye Am #181 represented, whether it was a symbol or a character, something ephemeral or omnipresent, Ryden simply said, “Searching for a clear explanation for the yam misses what really matters.”

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