Mark Ryden

Mark Ryden is an American painter born on January 20, 1963, in Medford, Oregon, and raised in Southern California. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1987. Between 1988 and 1998 he worked as a commercial artist, designing album covers for Aerosmith ("Love in an Elevator") and Michael Jackson ("Dangerous"), before devoting himself exclusively to gallery painting. His first solo exhibition, The Meat Show, in 1998, established him as the founder of a new genre: Pop Surrealism — also known as Lowbrow Art — which fuses Old Master techniques with iconography drawn from popular culture, childhood and the macabre. Interview Magazine dubbed him "the godfather of Pop Surrealism." His visual vocabulary — wide-eyed girls, Abraham Lincoln, meat, antique toys and religious symbolism — creates universes where innocence and the sinister coexist in a permanently beautiful tension. He has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and in 2017 designed the sets and costumes for the American Ballet Theatre production of Whipped Cream.