Brand New Gallery is pleased to present Ryan McNamara’s Candid, Ryan McNamara’s first Italian solo show.

American artist and performer, he creates situation-specific works that give form to an amplified participant perspective in his artistic production. Involving spectators, other artists or professional dancers, McNamara develops a social discourse in a singular and unmistakable manner, subverting the conventional notions of performance, embracing realism and interaction as necessary aspects of visual experience. Created before, during and after his performative events, his bi and three-dimensional objects, often produced with collages of overlapping Xeroxed images, become an essential and integral part of his artistic practice.

For this show Ryan McNamara, drawn by contemporary cultural media in all its declinations, examines the candid camera and, in general, the mechanism of determined TV shows in which the reactions of unaware pedestrians confronted with paradoxical situations are registered. The audience is invited to participate with the support of interactive audio guides that lead them into McNamara’s world.  

His influential works and projects (presented at Performa several times) have aroused the interest of important museums such as the Whitney or MOMA PS1 but also of famous fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, who, in 2010, invited the artist to conceive a site-specific performance for its boutique on Fifth Avenue.

During the opening and every Saturday from 3pm to 6pm the gallery will host a special interactive and entertaining event curated by Ryan McNamara.

Ryan McNamara was born in 1979 in Phoenix, Arizona and graduated at the New York Hunter College. His work has been presented in internationally renowned museums such as MOMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and, recently, at MAMA, Rotterdam. In 2010 he participated to The First International Performance Art Festival at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and his work has been often included in Performa, New York. His work is included in important collections such as MOMA, New York, Saatchi Gallery and the Zabludowicz Collection in London. He lives and works in New York.