Mark Ryden 'Eye Am' Show Opens Tonight

Artist: Mark Ryden
Title: Eye Am Art Show
Date: October 30th - December 20th, 2025
Venue: Perrotin Los Angeles
Address: 5036 W. Pico Blvd

*doors open at 5pm on Thursday October 20th, 2025

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Artist Statement

I always feel a certain resistance when asked to write or speak about my work. Painting, for me, begins where language ends. Words are linear - paintings are not. I’m interested in many things: sacred geometry, mysticism, consciousness, natural history, art history. Some are mysterious by nature, others more structured and concrete. But even with the more rational subjects, I’m not drawn to explaining them in my work. To analyze them would be to miss the point. What I’m really trying to paint is what can’t be said - the felt experience of something just beyond the edge of articulation. Not a thing to define, but something to feel.

I believe imagination has been undervalued in favor of intellectual interpretation. In the modern world, people are quick to search for verbal meaning, for an articulated answer, for a neat idea to attach to a piece of art. But that kind of meaning is not my goal. Mystery is. I want my paintings to carry unexplained secrets. “Secret” and “scared" share the same etymological root. I’m trying to paint what is sacred. I want to build a quiet bridge between this world and the other one, a glimpse of the invisible merging with the visible. In making the work for Eye Am, I did my best to let go of conscious restraints. I tried not to paint what I thought I should paint. I tried to make art only for myself. Paradoxically, I believe that’s the most honest way to reach anyone else. Each painting usually begins with something real and personal. Often it's a fragment drawn from my extensive collection of imagery, books, ephemera, toys, statues, icons. I’m an iconophile at heart.

I believe in the power of the image to speak directly to the soul, bypassing the verbal mind. There’s a passage I love from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” I’ve found this to be true. Real creativity doesn’t come from thinking harder; it comes from stopping thought long enough for something deeper to emerge. The mind can then shape what arises, but it can’t summon it. In that stillness, something ancient and essential can appear. That is the source I try to paint from - not for certainty, but for wonder.