Mark Ryden: Eye Am at Perrotin Los Angeles

Mark Ryden. Exhibition view of ‘Eye Am” at Perrotin Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of Mark Ryden and Perrotin.

By PIPER OLIVAS November 4th, 2025

Perrotin Los Angeles presents Eye Am, a new solo exhibition by artist Mark Ryden, composed of a selection of paintings and drawings. Ryden leads the viewer through a continuum of mise-en-scènes that stretch from recognizable cultural and religious figures—Jesus and Abraham Lincoln among them—to subjects that verge on the uncanny and phantasmagorical.

Ryden’s statement for Eye Am underscores his belief in imagination as a sacred act. Rejecting obvious analysis, he instead invites the viewer to explore “a quiet bridge between this world and the other one.” His process, he explains, is not about deliberate meaning-making but about surrender, “letting go of conscious restraint” to allow something ancient and dreamlike to emerge. In this sense, Ryden’s practice aligns with a lineage of visionary artists, from Hieronymus Bosch to Leonora Carrington, who painted from a place of intuition and symbolic resonance.

Mark Ryden, Communion #183, 2025. Oil on panel in hand-carved, gilded oak frame. Unframed: 17 x 32 inches, framed: 31 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches. Courtesy of Perrotin and the artist

Across the exhibition, and throughout Ryden’s broader œuvre, eyes recur as both symbol and subject—the all-seeing, direct, and unblinking organs of consciousness. Works such as The Sentinel #177, The Unturning Wheel #185, and Sweet Laurette #187 feature direct, hypnotic gazes. Other motifs, such as the portrait of a baby monarch titled King Jajo Cernunnos #180, Christ offering his blood to a group of girls, and various sentient and whimsical characters, inhabit a visual language that fuses a Renaissance aesthetic with Ryden’s signature pop surrealism. Yet, despite their familiarity, these images resist any plain explanation. As Ryden himself notes, “Painting begins where language ends.”

Works such as Eye Am #181 and the later Eye Am Too #182 feature a single anthropomorphic yam. In Eye Am #181, the yam lies on a bed, one eye open in quiet alertness. With a slightly Kafkaesque quality, I am reminded of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed, lying quietly on his back. In Eye Am Too #182, the yam floats upward with a spiritual quality, ascending toward what is described as “the sedentary self and, later, the higher self.” The frame, like many in the show, is adorned with jewels, suggesting that this figure might function as a relic or saint, imbued with mystery. The painting encapsulates Ryden’s fascination with the absurd and the sacred, the impulse to exalt even the smallest, strangest remnants of existence and what they may symbolize.

Mark Ryden, Eye Am #181, 2024. Oil on panel in hand-carved wood frame. Unframed: 19 x 30 inches, framed: 29 x 40 1/4 x 2 inches. Courtesy of Perrotin and the artist.

What makes Eye Am so engaging is its insistence on what is implied, or mystery as a mode of truth. The works neither affirm nor deny faith, beauty, or absurdity, but instead hold all these things in a fantastical tension. Ryden states, “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.”

Mark Ryden ‘Eye Am’ is on view at Perrotin Los Angeles, from October 30 – December 20, 2025