The macabre and kitsch meet in the work of Mark Ryden‘s new exhibit, The Gay Nineties West. The pop-surrealist artist will be the first talent exhibited at the brand new location of the 12,000 sq. ft Kohn Gallery space, which hosts its grand opening this Saturday. With the space’s inaugural exhibit, Ryden explores the theme of the “Gay ’90s,” a term coined during the roaring ’20s and harkening to the “simpler times” at the end of the 19th century.

Mark Ryden: The Gay 90s - West | Kohn Gallery announces the inaugural exhibition of its new, expansive 12,000-square foot space with new work by Los Angeles-based, Pop-Surrealist artist Mark Ryden. Ryden underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten "Gay 90s." Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America -- women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages -- Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture.

WERE YOU TO RUN into Mark Parker, Nike's NKE +0.09% CEO, on the company's pristine Beaverton, Oregon, campus, you might mistake him for one of the 21 PhDs who work in the athletic powerhouse's top-secret research lab.

Leonardo DiCaprio has become something of an auction fixture lately, attending major sales dressed in jeans and a baseball cap. Now, the star of "The Great Gatsby" has asked Christie's to help him pull off an auction of his own—to raise money for the environment.

For Mark Ryden, nostalgia is more than a panacea, a gentle salve that soothes the raw edges of modern existence — it is the very lifeblood of art. When he sits down to paint, he is surrounded by a jumble of wonderful old toys, books and peculiar artifacts that whisper to him in their myriad voices, sparking distant memories and forging strange connections.

Amidst the crowded opening for MOCA's sprawling The Artist's Museum, of all the gossipy conversations and encounters with social network "friends" that took place, the one that got me most excited was the one that Jim and I had about a new work of art that had yet to be released.

Attention amateur butchers, meat lovers and hungry aesthetes: At the Paul Kasmin Gallery, the artist Mark Ryden is doing wonders with off cuts at his new show, “The Gay ’90s: Olde Tyme Art Show.” The paintings of a Gibson girl riding a bicycle built for two with Jesus and a brooding beauty in period finery are spooky and lovely, but it’s his meatier images that steal the show — a wispy girl in a gown of hams, hindquarters and sausages, or Abraham Lincoln grinding fresh chuck for a tea-drinking demoiselle. Surreally delicious.

Mark Ryden’s paintings of wide-eyed Victorian children, Abraham Lincoln, and grade-A beef wed lowbrow culture with highbrow surrealism. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

Sweet Wishes, an animated short by Mark Ryden and his wife, Marion Peck, offers a succinct insight into the 47-year-old artist’s surreal aesthetic.

Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances."- The Dalai Lama

The above is a quote offered up by painter Mark Ryden when asked about the meaning behind his current exhibition, The Snow Yak Show, which opened in February at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery, and featured an array of work set in a mystical snow encrusted land populated by ghostly pale moon children and highly uncanny yet benevolent creatures.

The opening reception for Mark Ryden’s new exhibition, “The Tree Show” at Michael Kohn Gallery, was six hours long. If you glanced at the invitation beforehand, you might have thought this was a misprint. Six hours? Two is customary. Three is generous. Six, you might be forgiven for concluding, falls somewhere between pointless and pretentious. But then you would be seriously underestimating both the breadth and the fervor of Ryden’s fan base. In fact, the extension was merely practical.