Kathleen Ryan valuation
Makes giant rotting fruit out of glass beads and gemstones, with the mould picked out in semiprecious stone.
Kathleen Ryan was born in California in 1984 and works in New York.
What a work by Kathleen Ryan is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Kathleen Ryan was born in California in 1984 and works in New York. She took her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied under Charles Ray and Catherine Opie. She is best known for Bad Fruit, the series she began in 2018: grapes, melons, cherries and other fruit enlarged to a huge size and covered in glass and acrylic beads, with the rot picked out in semiprecious stones such as amazonite, turquoise and nephrite. The starting point is the beaded fruit kits once sold to homemakers, and the decay makes each one a memento mori. More recent pieces have rinds cut from salvaged vehicles.
Each sculpture is unique, so the title, the date and the list of materials are what identify it. The beads and stones are fixed with steel pins into a foam or polystyrene form, so the practical questions are loose or missing stones, any damage to the core, and how the work has been packed and moved. Gagosian and Karma represent her, and earlier works passed through galleries including François Ghebaly in Los Angeles. Their invoices are the usual documentation.
Karma, Hamburg and the monograph
Her 2021 show at Karma in New York put ten sculptures in the gallery's two East Village spaces. The Hamburger Kunsthalle gave her a survey from May to August 2024, with thirty sculptures from the previous ten years, and Gagosian showed new Bad Fruit at TEFAF New York in 2026, including Bad Melon (Fantasy). The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds her work, and a monograph, Kathleen Ryan: 2014 to 24, has an essay by Harry Thorne.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
