Morán Morán has announced the gallery representation of Ryan Trecartin. They will be presenting the artist’s work as part of their upcoming participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, and his first solo exhibition with the gallery is scheduled for 2025 in Los Angeles, CA. Trecartin will be co-represented by Morán Morán and Sprüth Magers. The artist Lizzie Fitch, with whom Trecartin has shared a collaborative practice for over a decade under the moniker Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, will also be joining the gallery as a solo artist in 2025.
Ryan Trecartin’s expansive practice in video, installation, sculpture, sound design, and photo-based work focuses on the fluid nature of identity, the unfolding definitions of community, and the complexities of subject formation. Writing—whether in the form of scripts he writes for his videos or poetic texts that function as prompts for his work in other media—is at the root of his practice. Trecartin tracks the ways in which individual and shared identities are transforming alongside the disorienting interrelationships between the body and language.
Trecartin is the artist most associated with anticipating and capturing the psychic and aesthetic aftereffects of developing forms of technology from the last two decades. He came to wide attention in 2004 with the video A Family Finds Entertainment. The work is emblematic of key aspects of his art: the self-aware tone, multilayered narrative, and dynamic use of animation and computer editing. These elements reposition the structural effects of reality television and predict the ways in which online sharing platforms (YouTube, TikTok, etc) have reordered our experience. Subsequent works have exposed our evolving relationship with the camera, a tool which has recast behavior in profound ways. Even more densely packed with characters, computer effects, and subplots, these works have a radical approach to storytelling that aligns with broader cultural shifts. The liberatory mood and multivalent approach to questions around personal agency and selfhood also reveal the artist’s enduring interest in conceptions of family and gender. In his work,
Trecartin creates arenas within which related social and cultural constructs may be subverted, and their hierarchies and conventions reworked.
Whether Line, Trecartin’s current major undertaking in collaboration with Fitch, was commissioned by Fondazione Prada in Milan and is set in the rural Ohio property that he and Fitch share. Conceptually, the work extends core aspects of his practice, specifically questions concerning the composition, maintenance, and meaning of personhood and the “self.” In the video component of Whether Line, Trecartin weaves the term “neighbor” into an exploration of land and related ideas around borders, occupation, and property. This focus on physical, ideological, claimed, and stolen territory continues the artists’ deconstruction of identity into a broader social and political realm. Having begun by constructing massive permanent movie sets that incorporate such features as a water-park-size lazy river embedded into the hillside and a 50-foot watch tower, Trecartin and Fitch continue to add to the project while incorporating contributions from other artists, aiming to establish an “art amusement park” and residency.
Ryan Trecartin (b 1981, Webster, TX) works and lives in Athens, OH. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2019); Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2018); Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin: Priority Innfield, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2016); and Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin: Site Visit, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014). Trecartin’s work is held in the permanent collection of over thirty major American and international institutions.
