Artcore / Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Ryan McGinness's first solo exhibition in Canada. Aesthetic Comfort presents new paintings and sculptures as well as a black light room installation by this internationally recognized, New York City-based artist.

By mixing digital technologies with more traditional crafts like silk screening and painting, McGinness, who is represented in New York City by the highly innovative and influential galleries Deitch Projects and Pace Prints, is known for his slick, flat, colourful works. Composed of swirling worlds of original icons, his non-linear rebus-like paintings spill off their canvases and climb the walls. McGinness has developed a unique visual language that is accessible and eye-tingling as it invites us into his world. However, like ancient hieroglyphs, his sign system tells stories whose narratives are left to viewers to decipher.

McGinness’s new Aesthetic Comfort works present a Jackson Pollock-esque all-over cacophony of icons, drawn from the artist's vast and ever increasing repertoire of graphic drawings. Assuming the power of logos and authoritative signage, McGinness subverts those corporate branding strategies toward universal legibility of visual modes of communication, and creates baroque mash-ups that result in beautiful collisions which inundate viewers with his personal playful stories that do not clearly convey any specific meanings but are somehow never confusing. Numerous references from our pop culture landscape find their way into McGinness’s kaleidoscopic visual mindscapes to promote a new, beautiful, if utterly quixotic, form of communication.

Ryan McGinness, 36, grew up in Virginia Beach and was influenced by skate and surf culture, rock concert poster design, and street art. In 1994, he received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and then moved to Manhattan where he still lives and works. In 2005, Rizzoli New York published Installationview and this esteemed publisher will publish Ryan McGinness Works in the Spring of 2009. He has been the subject of hundreds of articles in various publications including Art News, Art Review, Art Forum, Metropolitan, and The New York Times. His solo shows have been hosted in cities around the world, including Milan, New York City, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, Munich, and Seattle and he has been included in many museum exhibitions at highly prestigious institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, P.S.1/MoMA in New York City, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. McGinness has guest lectured extensively in the United States and his works have been acquired by many of the most important collections and museums in the world.

Works from the artist's new Aesthetic Comfort series will also be shown in simultaneous solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum and Franklin Artworks (Minneapolis). A limited-edition artist’s book of the same title, published by Los Angeles-based Arkitip to accompany this series of exhibitions, will be launched at the opening reception at Artcore on September 27, 2008.