Cherry and Martin presents new works on paper by Ruby Osorio. The gallery also announces the release of Osorio’s first suite of hand-colored, hand-stitched lithographs.

The exhibition opens at Cherry and Martin on January 12, 2008 and runs through February 16, 2008.
The opening reception is Saturday, January 12, 2008 from 6-8pm.

Ruby Osorio’s latest works delve into the interplay between mischief, myth, and art. Following upon her recent solo show in  Athens, Greece, Osorio focuses on the long-standing archetype of the trickster in Greek mythology and other cultures. As Lewis Hyde states in his book, Trickster Makes This World, “Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.” It is in this ability to hold contradictory positions that artistic renewal occurs. New possibilities also emerge for Osorio’s idiosyncratic language of thought and unreasoning.  Employing a preparatory process of collage and improvisation, Osorio reorders the meaning of signs and signifiers taken out of their original context to raise more questions than can be answered at first glance of one of her paintings. Encoding meaning becomes the focus of the creative process and with it, Osorio consciously investigates artifice and its ability to both mask and reveal personal, social, and cultural assumptions.

In a work like The Troublesome Bouquet (2007), Osorio depicts a delicately painted circular swag of flowers and feathers interwoven with skeleton bones and the legs of a woman.  Simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, The Troublesome Bouquet demonstrates that the act of revealing absurd and impossible scenarios conceals an imperative impulse to make sense of what unfolds in daily life. In Osorio’s own words, “Psychological tensions depicted through the use of positive and negative space betray the need for order and stability in the picture plane. Aesthetic beauty obscures the shadow self. A puzzling image subverts an easy answer to philosophical quandaries. These are the realizations I derive from the process of creating and imagining unusual scenarios.”

Arcanum Editions, New York has published a suite of four six-color lithographs hand drawn by Ruby Osorio. Such Wayward Whimsies, Osorio’s first suite of prints, were inspired by four specific prints from Goya’s Los Caprichos and examine women on the brink of betrothal or seduction.  The prints are infused with an unflinching feminine perspective and fashioned with hand stitching, intricate color palates, precise rendering and fantastical imagery. Printed in Los Angeles at El Nopal Press, the suite is an edition of 25 with six artist proofs.

Ruby Osorio’s work is currently on view in Domestic Departures, a group show that includes Kiki Smith, Kara Walker and Amy Cutler at the Cal State University, Fullerton museum. In September she had a solo exhibition at Vamiali in Athens, Greece. Her first museum show, Ruby Osorio: Story of a Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far Away), was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2005 and the Laguna Art Museum in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and London and reviewed in numerous publications.