Rick Wolfryd

While exploring a series of unique images linking man and machine, Wolfryd refers to his art images as "Digital Reconstructions" and views himself as a “Spectral Painter” currently based in Palm Springs, CA. Wolfryd has been developing this project for the past five years, and his first solo exhibition in LA provides a generous survey of recent works.

This exhibition will include artwork from several series including "Digital Action Heroes," “Fantasy Landscapes” and "Cybernetic Spirit Guides.” All are intuitively created digital culture designs with intense emotional and psychological appeal. Whether through four-panel works on paper or canvas transfers, Wolfryd imbues his subjects, objects and landscapes with elegance and restraint.

According to Carole Lieff, Los Angeles-based art dealer and friend of the artist, "I have known Rick Wolfryd for almost 20 years. Rick has been a maverick artist and art dealer; a renegade. Nothing has changed. He will not hew to many of the conventions (and pretensions) that seem to drive the art market. Rick creates his Outsider Art works empirically (although he holds BS and MFA degrees), discovering new parts of himself and the art as he goes along. Recently, Rick has produced the finest art works, I believe, of his lifetime. These computer-assisted works are like fluorescent candy for the retina, and as Rick made these works, he discovered serendipitously that their parts were interchangeable, and that they worked perfectly in a variety of permutations. No, this is not the conventional path of LA's "New Artist." But it is honest, speculative work. And the confluence of the patterns and the way they succeed serially, as if by chance, is maybe not chance at all."

Wolfryd states, “Although I have spent most of my lifetime as a contemporary art dealer, I have always been an artist trapped inside a dealer's body. And it is harder being responsible for the creative--rather than the reactive. I have been fortunate in being able to use my art dealer background as a platform to learn and absorb the verities and skills of many of my modern and contemporary art heroes from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol. My goal as an artist is to "discover" visual information that will provide a profound experience to the viewer; and I often feel much more like a “miner” than an “artist.” There is an incredible array of found objects and subjects generated through my experiments. They reveal an unexpected sensitivity not ordinarily associated with computer software and machines."

2006 marks the 10-year anniversary for Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, one of the largest Warhol dealers in the United States. The Gallery sells a wide variety of modern, contemporary and pop art masters including Lichtenstein, Haring, Hockney, Basquiat, Ruscha and many others, to dealers, galleries, and individual collectors worldwide Hamilton-Selway Fine Art is located at 8678 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069. For more information please call 310-657-1711 or visit www.hamiltonselway.com. To learn more about the artist, please see his online museum at www.wolfrydcollection.com.

Part of the proceeds from this exhibition will be donated to PAWS and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center.