Ryan Preciado

Karma presents Portraits, an exhibition of sculptures by Ryan Preciado. Preciado’s exhibitions at Karma coincides with the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, So Near, So Far, at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which opens October 5, 2024.

Portraits comprises sculpture, wall works, and an architectural intervention into the space. The Town I Live In (2024) fills nearly the entirety of the front gallery. The presence of the sculpture, which takes the form of a house, within the white cube invites visitors to consider how the comfort of a domestic environment can alter our relationships to art and to one another. This twelve-by-fourteen-foot structure takes clues from the work of two of Preciado’s formative architectural influences, Jean Prouvé and Aldo Rossi. Its exterior is ringed by a built-in bench, while inside, a red daybed welcomes visitors to sit and stay a while. The shape of Beaudry Avenue Daybed (2024) at once evokes a highway protection barrier in Echo Park that Preciado passes daily and Donald Judd’s early floor works. The lush fuschia carpet lining the interior nods to Ettore Sottsass’s 1965 Casa Lana, which the Italian architect envisioned as “rooms within a room.” A bookshelf integrated into the architecture of The Town I Live In hosts an array of volumes that pay homage to Preciado’s collaborators and inspirations. Together, these allusions weave seemingly discrete references into a new vernacular, legible on both personal and collective levels.

Preciado’s practice extends from an attentiveness to the people in his life and those that came before him. These include the mechanics at José Auto Body in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, who treat his sculptures with automotive paint and are crucial interlocutors; his grandmother, whose time running a small museum dedicated to the Chumash people introduced Preciado to the material culture of his ancestors; and other friends and colleagues in his home of Los Angeles. Installed in the rear gallery, the alder wood sculpture Totem (Alone Together) (2024) consists of fluid stacked shapes modeled on sink handles found at Los Angeles’s Oaxaca Hardware, where a conversation with the store’s owner inspired the work. Bird in Boyle Heights (2024) is based on the form of a bicycle key given to Preciado by the owner of another shop in the titular neighborhood. Rather than depicting these various figures, each of these “portraits” foregrounds the objects that connect them to the artist, abstracting visual likeness into relational materiality.

The back room of the gallery features, among other works, an array of what Preciado calls “insecure sculptures” due to their simultaneous status as art and functional objects. The lacquered Pope Cabinet (Blue) (2024)—a hutch based on the shape of the Papal mitre, a form of Catholic headgear—and Asuncion 2 (2024), a shining, curvy magenta cupboard, rest on the floor, reflecting their surroundings in their high-polish finishes. Color Theory (Palm Springs) (2024), a circular, enamel-on-steel wall workpainting made up of concentric rings of green, gray, white, black, and blue, is part of a body of work that has emerged from the artist’s inquiry into the interactions of solid hues. Chromatic relationships, personal connections, cultural hybridization: Preciado’s practice maps all of these affinities. Behind slick surfaces and sanded finishes, a complex, interconnected network vibrates.

If Portraits is an invitation to enter into this network, 4 × 4, a group exhibition at 172 East 2nd Street, is an even more explicit homage to the community that has been the foundation of his art education. Each of the forty-eight artists Preciado invited to contribute a four-by-four inch artwork is part of his extended network of inspirations, friends, and mentors. They include his grandmother; Los Angeles artists; and Dynasty Upholstery, among others. The limited size of their contributions, which are all displayed in small cubbies embedded in a white, geometric structure of Preciado’s design, speaks to the artist’s desire to keep things accessible, local, and non-hierarchical.