The dolled up rotten fruits of Kathleen Ryan

The Californian artist has become world famous for her incredible sculptures of rotting food made with jewels.

“The sculptures are beautiful and very enjoyable, but they are always accompanied by ugliness and disquiet.”

These are the words that sculptor Kathleen Ryan told the New York Times a year ago. The purpose of the report was to find out how an artist could achieve critical acclaim and fame in the art world by creating fake rotten fruit, where the rot, however, is made precisely of, in theory, the most beautiful things: precious and semi-precious stones.

Eight weeks of work to “rot” their precious fruits

This Californian, born in Santa Monica in 1984, plays with this dichotomy, using amethyst or marble, taking her an average of 8 weeks of work to create, in large-scale works made of concrete or iron, the mould that covers spoiled food. As in her latest exhibition at the François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles, it can be seen in an immense bunch of grapes or slices of watermelon infected with fungi and insects.

Kathleen Ryan's hidden message to her collectors.

The artist believes that her works “are not only opulent, but inherently contain the idea of ​​decline” and she makes this known in a hidden message to future collectors of her works. For her, this is something that also happens in the world, given that “wealth inequality is increasing at the expense of the environment” , hence the use of glass in different shades for the “non-rotten” parts of her sculptures:

Mold is decay, but it is the most living part.

Kathleen Ryan