The Air Gallery, 32 Dover Street, London W1S 4NE

TAG Fine Arts is proud to present a major exhibition of new papercuts and screenprints by internationally renowned artist Rob Ryan. Displaying the traditional Rob Ryan beauty that we know and love, these new works capture the distinctive qualities of the evocative hand-crafted papercut, drawing the viewer into Ryan’s world of romance.

Demonstrating Ryan’s consummate artistic skill, these enchanting images conjure a romantic world where viewers lose themselves in a brooding emotional intensity. The works tell stories of love with hand-cut, heartfelt messages: some poignant, some amusing and some touching – ‘you smiled at me and from nothing something came’.

Ryan’s poetry-filled art call to mind the fairy-tales of our youth, but the simple subjects belie the deceptive and sophisticated manner in which the works are painstakingly hand cut with the smallest of scalpels from the finest of papers. He explains that ‘because everything is cut from one sheet of paper, it forces a decorative pattern’ in which everything links together and develops simultaneously.

Layers are key in what Ryan enjoys looking at and what he enjoys creating. His favourite painting, Titian’s Death of Actaeon, is thrilling and moody with multiple layers and stories, whilst his favourite building is the Victoria & Albert Museum with its numerous different levels. Ryan is a romantic and his highly decorative papercuts show loving couples with hands clasped, surrounded by church bells, boats, boughs and other motifs but, on closer inspection, you will discover words delicately cut amongst the imagery and see a world filled with dark as well as light where love, hate, loss, pain, fear and death are interwoven. This body of work, beneath its overtly visual romanticism, is visceral in its melancholy.

Wanting to ‘create art’ from a young age, Ryan studied fine art at Nottingham Trent University before completing an MA in printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Having worked with TAG since the gallery’s launch, Ryan has gained international acclaim as an illustrator and artist. His works hold universal appeal and he was recently included in major exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and Somerset House, London.