Cordy Ryman

THEN / NOW

New York Times: May 6, 2005 ART REVIEW; Making An Entrance At Any Age (excerpt) - By ROBERTA SMITH | Cordy Ryman Abstraction isn’t dead, but these days it is usually served spiked with decisive bits of reality, in terms of material, installation or both. Cordy Ryman, an artist who is included in the ‘’Greater New York’’ exhibition at P.S. 1 and who is having his first show at the Phatory, in the East Village, favors both. His casual, hands-on, irreverent formalism features strong monochromes -fluorescent pink, for example -- painted on scraps of wood and installed in corners, on the ceiling or on doorjambs. More conventional works, executed on squarish slabs of wood or Styrofoam, tend to have unpainted places that indicate where the artist held the piece while he was painting it. A sectional piece leans against the wall like a fat, folding measuring stick. In essence, Mr. Ryman treats the Phatory’s small storefront as if it were a canvas, accenting the eccentricities of the space and creating an artistic whole comprised of disparate, site-specific incidents. 

ART PULSE | Lily Wei - curator, writer, art critic.  Cordy Ryman’s show at Phatory, a small East Village gallery, which just closed, -turned the storefront into a colorful, spare 3-D painting with his judicious installation of small painted wooden geometric sculpture, a more integrated, intimate project than his contribution to PS 1′s Greater New York show.

Art in America | Date: 5/1/2006 | Author: Maine, Stephen Remains of the Day, or New Dawn? Some 20 years after its heyday as the premier scene providing an alternative to then growing SoHo, the East Village boasts a handful of noteworthy venues, though it lacks the concentration found south of Houston Street. The nonprofit P.S. 122, at 10th Street and First Avenue, has been a fixture since the late ’70s, presenting shows by unaffiliated artists curated by a jury that changes annually. The multidisciplinary, multicultural Tribes Gallery, established in 1993 on East 3rd Street, has a strong literary underpinning by way of founder Steve Cannon’s background as a poet, playwright and novelist. A noteworthy recent addition to the neighborhood is The Phatory on East 9th Street, where Sally Lelong presents challenging work in her modest storefront space. Betraying an interest in abstraction, Lelong has shown optically playful wall works made from secondhand carpets by Monique Luchetti, Carolanna Parlato’s organic, oozing poured-acrylic canvases, and painted-wood constructions by Cordy Ryman.