Will Ryman | Rose #2 (Icon Red) | 2011

Ryman, son of internationally renowned artists Robert Ryman and Merrill Wagner, worked as a writer and playwright for a decade before creating his first sculpture in 2001, based on a character in a play. Each of his sculptures and tableaux are cobbled together from a material grab bag and suffused with poetic meaning while grounded in the real world of contemporary American culture. He cites influences from philosophers to the writings of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, taking away their absurdist view of the world. 

Ryman’s Rose #2 (Icon Red), 2011, lies like Sleeping Beauty atop a pedestal on a white marble deck. The rose has ancient and contradictory associations in Western culture, representing purity as well as passion and fertility, life as well as death. The gigantic glossy flower attracts us to its pretty throne—just watch out for its huge, sharp thorns. Ryman refers to the romantic history of the rose while slyly commenting on how it is used to sell the products of romance. Ryman’s Rose is part of a dispersed urban garden that includes everything else in our landscape, from cigarette butts and floating plastic bags to architecture, cars and pedestrians.