The Tree Show

The Tree Show collects the paintings from Mark Ryden's 2007 exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, in which the artist absorbs the Roman poet Ovid's tales of transformation from the Metamorphoses and refracts them through his own dense vocabulary of art-historical figuration and contemporary pop culture.

Populated by porcelain-skinned girls, taxidermied creatures, religious iconography and confectionery color, the paintings return again and again to trees and the forest as sites of metamorphosis, drawing equally on Old Master painting technique and the visual language of vintage illustration. An accompanying text by critic Holly Myers situates the work within Ryden's broader mythology. The catalog was published by Porterhouse Fine Art Editions in both trade and limited editions.

Ryden (born 1963), a central figure of the Los Angeles "pop surrealist" or "lowbrow" movement, built his reputation on meticulously rendered, uncanny tableaux that fuse Renaissance-derived technique with children's-book sweetness and occult symbolism; The Tree Show is among his most fully developed single-exhibition bodies of work.