The Hogar Collection”, the first solo exhibition at the gallery, of recent works on paper by Lee Ranaldo. Known as co-founder of the seminal rock band Sonic Youth, Ranaldo’s visual work weaves an intriguing poetic fabric that is at once a reflective re-inspection of popular culture and media while simultaneously containing a loose and indeterminate philosophy that is able to shrug it all away and let it be as it is. His multi-disciplinary artistic practice includes music, sound, painting, printmaking, video, sculpture, installation, writing and poetry, which are at times represented in their singular forms and at others integrated into a flawless body that fluidly combines the varied mediums into one. His work relies on a straightforward kind of honesty that frequently borrows and manipulates readymade imagery. In one series of ink paintings on paper, imagery from newspaper clippings are magnified and subtly altered, removed from their original journalistic context and re-presented as purely visual images. Divorced from the stories surrounding them, the pictures begin to describe a new, accumulative narrative, free of topical content. Found texts in the form of spam are often used as a component in the free-form prose used to juxtapose unrelated images, texts or sounds. All in all, Ranaldo’s work navigates our media-saturated world, seeking to liberate pure graphic images from their time-bound context, to complete some unknown puzzle, which then blurs the boundaries of art with the overtones of a distorted, melodic riff.

Lee Ranaldo was born in 1956 in Glen Cove, NY and lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally at such places as the Pompidou Center in Paris, P.S.1, New York, The Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Hayward Gallery, London, MACBA, Barcelona and Printed Matter, New York among others.