PAUL HENRY RAMIREZ
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      • RattleX: Grounds for Sculpture
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      • BALLS: Tang Museum
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Space Addiction
​Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, 2002

Space Addiction at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, 2002
Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street

The New York Times Paul Henry Ramirez — ‘Space Addiction’
Sept, 2002, by KEN JOHNSON

If Austin Powers were an artist, he might do something like the work of Paul Henry Ramirez. In flat, hard-edged graphics reminiscent of the Pop and Color Field painting of the 1960’s, Mr. Ramirez creates zany montages of semi-abstracted body parts — spurting breasts, delicately hair-fringed orifices, dangling genitalia — and fully abstract elements, like targets, polka-dots, stripes and single-hued planes. In shades of pink and other tones suggesting skin, as well as bright whites and suave, slightly toned-down decorator colors, Mr. Ramirez’s fertile imagery proliferates all over the walls, turning a room into a visionary, wrap-around environment of erotic animation.

Here at the Whitney’s Philip Morris gallery, he has expanded into aural space, providing a soundtrack of quirky, computerized sound effects. He has also gone into three dimensions with coolly modernistic cushioned benches upholstered in colors that match the wall painting.

For all its surface pizzazz, Mr. Ramirez’s art has intriguing conceptual implications. It satirizes the utopian fantasies of mid-20th-century design and suggests, with all the lactating mammary imagery, that the impulse to create environments of holistic harmony may be driven less by formalist rationality than by infantile yearning for the ideally nurturing mother.

In the Philip Morris Sculpture Court, an exhibition titled ‘’Outer City, Inner Space’’ offers three large-scale projects that resonate with Mr. Ramirez’s Neo-Pop lunacy.

 © PAUL HENRY RAMIREZ  LLC. All Rights Reserved
  • HOME
  • works
    • painting >
      • FUN IN THE COLOR
      • ECCENTRIC STIMULI
      • PLAYCONICS
      • BLACKOUT
      • CHUNK
      • IN FLUENT FORM
    • drawing >
      • 29 BY 23 INCH
      • Paint Chips
      • 27 x 6.5 Feet
      • Spread II
    • sculpture >
      • SMOOTHIE PHYSIQUE II
      • Smoothie Physique
      • CONFECTION
      • NAKED
      • 100% Virgin Vinyl
    • installations >
      • Sweet On: Kemper Museum
      • RATTLE: Grounds For Sculpture
      • BEAUTY REIGNS: Akron Art Museum
      • BEAUTY REIGNS: McNay Art Museum
      • BLACKOUT: The Newark Museum
      • SPIN: Tarble Arts Center
      • Going Up, Up, Up, Percent For Art Commission
      • Seriously Playful: Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center
      • Elevatious Transcendsualistic: Tang Museum
      • Elevatious Transcendsualistic: Diverse Works
      • Space Addiction: Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
      • Pop Surrealism: Aldrich Museum
    • collaborations >
      • RattleX: Grounds for Sculpture
      • Zero Point Zero: Newark Museum
      • Paul Henry Ramirez with designer Rachel Roy: Bergdorf Goodman and New Museum
      • BALLS: Tang Museum
    • commissions >
      • RATTLE: Grounds for Sculpture
      • BEAUTY REIGNS
      • BLACKOUT: The Newark Museum
      • Elevatious Transcendsualistic
  • resume
  • about
  • links
  • press
    • Bibliography
  • contact