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Ryba Art Advisory

@rybaartadvisory

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Ryba Art Advisory
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One of my favorite works at Frieze Masters this year is Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1994), presented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

I’ve always loved Bontecou’s strange, marvelous imagination. Her sculptures seem to belong to a world of her own invention, populated by curious creatures, flying machines, and things that might have alighted from another planet.

Made from steel, wire, porcelain, and silk, it looks as though it might be part insect, part spacecraft, or perhaps a tiny universe held together by threads. I find myself wanting to peer into every corner of it, following its delicate architecture and wondering what might live there.

Above: Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1994. Presented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art at Frieze Masters 2026. by @rybaartadvisory

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12 hours ago

Off to London this evening for the fairs. One of the works I’m especially hoping to see at Frieze Masters is Agnes Martin’s Untitled #7 (1990), presented by Ortuzar.

The painting is from Martin’s astonishing series of gray-banded canvases from the 1980s and 1990s. At first glance, its alternating horizontal bands of lighter and darker gray seem almost perfectly uniform. But look closer and you begin to notice the subtle shifts in tone and her delicate hand-drawn graphite lines.

As Ortuzar has so beautifully observed, the painting holds “minimalist restraint in balance with the trace of the artist’s hand.” I love that something so seemingly simple and mechanical can feel so personal, and increasingly so the better you get acquainted. The little imperfections are part of what makes it deeply moving, and Martin had this extraordinary ability to make the smallest gestures feel monumental.

Here’s hoping my flight is as peaceful as these lovely, cloud-soft horizons. by @rybaartadvisory

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6 days ago

I’ve always liked this Alice Neel work on paper, Untitled (Bowery) from 1936.

What I find interesting about Neel is how little distance she placed between art and the lives around her. She could make the poverty, loneliness, and eccentricity of New York palpable without ever reducing her subjects to social types.

David Zwirner and Victoria Miro will share a booth dedicated to Neel at Frieze Masters next week, which I’m excited to see in person.

Alice Neel, Untitled (Bowery), 1936 by @rybaartadvisory

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9 days ago

Brice Marden once wrote: “Painters are amongst the priests, worker priests of the cult of man, searching to understand but never to know.”

“I Am Plane Image” is really one of those shows that lights you up inside. It made me think about how much a person can change while remaining recognizably themselves. It’s a definitive exhibition of how certain interests can persist over a lifetime, even as personal experience and broader cultural changes alter the way they are pursued.

The exhibition moves across nearly six decades, from the monochromes of the mid-’60s through the multipanel paintings of the ’70s and into the extraordinary calligraphic works. What becomes clear is that Marden never really abandoned one language for another. He kept returning to the same essential questions: what happens when colors meet, how a line can carry movement and emotion, how two shapes can create space without describing anything recognizable.

Strangely, one of the works I liked least may have moved me most. “Untitled” (2021–23), the final painting Marden made before his death, hangs near those reduced early works. Its three panels, rectangular fields, and muted colors look almost unfinished. After six decades of painting, there he was again, returning to the same visual language with which he started.

I went home that night and began listening to a lecture on the work, trying to understand more. And one thing Brice wrote in his master’s thesis at Yale in 1963 really stayed with me. He wrote: “I began to concentrate on this idea of rectangles. I consider color as tonality, edge as interpretations and meetings of shapes, space as the lack of it in naturalistic terms, technicalities as permanence, paint as surface, light, atmosphere, form as poetry, mystery, that unexplainable thing that good painting has.”

It was all there from the beginning: the unexplainable matter of great paintings.

Brice Marden, Balanced Expression, 1977–2008

The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version, 2000–06

D’après la Marquise de la Solana, 1969

Postcard of Francisco de Goya’s Portrait of the Marquise de la Solana, 1795, from Marden’s studio. The reference for his painting D’après la Marqu taken in Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York by @rybaartadvisory

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11 days ago

I went to see Wolfson’s new work at Gagosian on West 24th the other day, which I thought was excellent. Thinking about that show, and about “New Humans” at the New Museum, made me think of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 2024 that I still can’t get out of my head: Jordan Wolfson’s “Body Sculpture.”

I walked into this huge, silent room and saw a strange machine: a metal body suspended from a chain beneath a large red robotic arm, with two humanlike arms and hands extending from its front. It swung, dragged itself, lowered itself. It had no face, yet every gesture felt expressive.

At first, its movements were almost tender and playful. Then they became sexual, grinding against the floor. The room was tense. It felt like watching a sex scene in a movie next to a stranger. Wolfson has described the sculpture’s movement as a way to make us more aware and present in our own bodies. It’s about seeing ourselves through three-dimensional objects.

More than anything, it made me think about loneliness. This sad machine getting off on itself felt reflective of our narcissistic, screen-obsessed solipsism, or the isolation of being alive alongside technology. It could move, perform, express desire, but it was completely alone, the mark of its fullest humanism. You felt empathy for it, which was perhaps the strangest thing of all. Or at least I did.

On the way out was an amazing permanent-collection hang selected by Wolfson himself: Judd, Warhol, Brancusi, McCarthy, Sturtevant, and lots of my all-time favorite, Arbus. What taste he has. I always trust an artist’s eye. taken in National Gallery of Australia, Canberra by @rybaartadvisory

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16 days ago

Daichi Takagi, Suchness at David Zwirner, London.

I’ve been placing Daichi’s work since 2021 and have been obsessed with it ever since, so it’s wonderful to see him have a solo show at David Zwirner. Excited to see it in person in a few weeks.

Daichi Takagi, Stones, 2026

Daichi Takagi, Rain, 2026

Daichi Takagi, Stone, 2026

Daichi Takagi, Wanderer, 2026

Daichi Takagi, Wanderer, 2026 by @rybaartadvisory

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21 days ago

I’ve always loved Independent 20th Century. Over the past few years it has introduced me to some incredible historical discoveries, and this year mine is Manina.

Born Marianne Tischler in Vienna in 1918, she gave herself the name Manina, meaning “little hand” in Italian. Her life seems to contain an improbable amount of 20th-century art history. The daughter of Expressionist painter Viktor Tischler, she grew up in prewar Paris and, at sixteen, became a muse to Erwin Blumenfeld. She fled rising antisemitism for Los Angeles in 1938, began drawing after a visit to Frida Kahlo in Mexico, and later moved to New York, where she exhibited at Alexander Iolas’s Hugo Gallery alongside René Magritte. Eventually she returned to Europe, settled in Venice, and became closely involved with the Surrealists. André Breton called her “pure poetry.”

The paintings are sort of strange: eyes, serpents, shells, suns and bodies accumulate into these incredibly dense private cosmologies. I can’t quite decide whether they feel ancient or futuristic.

This discovery also landed with me because my paternal grandmother was born in Vienna in the early 1930s. Her parents collected a handful of little-known Austrian artists, works she still lives with today at 95 in Sydney. I’ve always felt some inexplicable pull toward Viennese artists because of that.

Manina, Matrimonio Alchimista [Alchemist Wedding], 1974

Manina, Angelo nostro spirito [Angel our spirit], 1969

Manina, Materializzare lo Spazio, Spiritualizzare la Materia [Materialising Space, Spiritualising Matter], 1968 by @rybaartadvisory

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23 days ago

Back in New York and excited for the Arthur Jafa and Bowery openings at the New Museum this week. But before those open, I wanted to say something about one of my favorite shows of the year, New Humans: Memories of the Future.

What I loved about the exhibition is that it made me think about the future by looking backwards. Across nearly two hundred works by artists, writers, and architects, it asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be human?

The anxieties we have around technology today are hardly new. The word “robot” didn’t even exist before 1920, but as industrialization and mass media transformed everyday life, artists were already imagining new kinds of bodies, their attendant labor and dreams. By way of the Bauhaus’s “New Man,” the Surrealists’ uncanny bodies, and Fritz Lang’s robotic Maria, the future was already being invented.

Seeing those works now, alongside our own anxieties around AI, makes the past feel strangely proximate. The futures we worry about today have been imagined many times before: some arrived, some didn’t, some we’re still waiting for.

Maybe that’s why the exhibition feels particularly right for the New Museum as it moves into its own next chapter. The building is changing, the technology is changing, the question of what it means to be human is both persistent and changing too. taken in New Museum by @rybaartadvisory

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24 days ago

LOVE this show. David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis at White Cube. taken in White Cube by @rybaartadvisory

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5 months ago

Excited to be part of this year’s curatorial committee for the Eighth House Residency benefit exhibition, hosted at 56 Henry and online with Platform. Thank you to the three artists I selected, Peter Shear, Nicholas Bierk, and Henry Curchod, for your generous contributions. These works will be exhibited alongside many others over the course of two weeks, and all sales support Eighth House, a nonprofit arts residency.

For those not 100% familiar with Eighth House, it is a restorative, non-transactional residency program for artists, curators, and writers based in the mountains of Vermont. Its mission is to gift artists time and space for rest and reprieve deep in nature, supporting their inspiration and creative process.

It is a mission I strongly believe in, and I am proud to have served on the board of trustees since it was founded in 2021 by the wonderful Katie McCarty. The residency continues to expand year by year, with exciting developments currently underway to make it an even more special place for the artists who keep the magic alive.

“Community as Praxis”
May 20–31
105 Henry Street

Opening Reception
Wednesday, May 20 from 6–8pm

In partnership with Platform. taken in New York, New York by @rybaartadvisory

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5 months ago

Celia Paul, Burning Painter, 2025. 'Innervisions' at Gladstone. by @rybaartadvisory

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5 months ago

Curated list by our friend Rebecca Ryba ⭐️ @rybaartadvisory

Note from Rebecca:
I started this list without a theme in mind, just adding what caught my eye in New York this month. But as I put this together during a freezing January, I kept returning to artists who worked outside the system—either geographically isolated, self-taught, or overlooked.

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) spent decades painting in a remote location in Finland, largely unknown internationally. Her show at the Met is incredible—I love the hauntingly beautiful self-portraits she painted at the very end of her life. James Castle (1899–1977) was born deaf and worked in isolation in rural Idaho, entirely self-taught. He used soot, spit, and whatever materials he could scavenge—envelopes, sticks, homemade tools—and made work for nearly seventy years. His show is at Rodder. Frank Walter (1926–2009), another self-taught artist, became a recluse later in life. He spent the last twenty-five years working in a remote rural shack in Antigua. He has a solo at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Leslie Bohnenkamp (1943–1997) and Bill Bollinger (1939–1988), two artists working in late 1960s-80s New York with rigorous material practices, are both getting a spotlight with shows up now. Justin Bradshaw (1971) is originally from London but has been working in Italy for twenty years. Still relatively unknown, he’s having his first New York show at Galerie Sardine’s beautiful new space on East 10th. A month of discovery and rediscovery.

Also really enjoyed these shows: Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth, Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum (figurative work from the ‘70s), Keith Haring’s 1984 FDR Drive mural at Martos (ten out of ten). I loved Arthur Jafa’s selections at MoMA. Also stop by the Morgan Library to see Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”.

Enjoy the shows. #ShowrunnerNYC taken in New York, New York by @rybaartadvisory

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8 months ago