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Ryan Schroeder
Ryan Schroeder is a professional artist and museum preparator from Rochester, New York. His body of work primarily focuses on cultural erasure, environmental destruction, and overlooked people in society through oil paintings. Ryan has won numerous art awards and grants, including two Elizabeth Greenshields Grants, and has been featured in various art publications. His art has been shown in over 20 exhibitions around the US, Asia, and Europe. Ryan was an artist-in-residence at Shanghai University in China and was twice the artist-in-residence of the Raketensation at the Insel Hombroich Foundation in Germany. He was also selected as a Fulbright Scholar for painting in Düsseldorf and Münster, Germany.
Ryan has previously worked for Jeff Koons and at the Guggenheim Museum on retrospective exhibitions with artists such as Alex Katz that have been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors and featured in the New York Times and Vogue. In 2022, he was the Featured Artist for the White House Fellows Annual Leadership Conference. Ryan was the first in his family to receive a post-secondary degree, receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Art Academy
I think of my work as psychological realms, that depict elements of reality. I am interested in the relationships between figures, and their surroundings. I consider myself a voyeur to these scenes; watching quietly from a distance.
I also make paintings that depict disheveled domestic spaces. These works in particular engage themes of chaos, loss, and mental health. I am interested in the idea of cultural erasure, by way of war, socioeconomic changes, the outsourcing of jobs, and deindustrialization.
I am interested in the idea of subtraction; the removal of material things from a place, or the removal of individuals from their dwellings. Elements of our culture are reflected in what we leave behind. Using dilapidated interiors as a tableau, I seek to challenge the parameters of taste and engage with reality, including its abject elements.