Ryan Driscoll’s portraits – inspired just as much by modern photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Dora Maar as they are by painters like Rossetti and Bronzino – co-opt Late Renaissance painting techniques and compositions to explore queered perceptions of beauty, love and death. Queer experience is communicated through Driscoll’s uses of the rich symbolic language and intertextuality found in Mannerism painting, in which every element and object holds great significance and allegory. His work also invokes Greek and Roman mythology, melodrama and fantasy to subvert fixed notions of gender. In his paintings, predominantly crafted with oil on wooden board and using himself as a life model, represent androgynous, fluid figures who are able to assert both tenderness, fragility and power. 

Soft Opening

Corby

Amsterdam

Grimm

London

Mall Gallery

Tate Britain

Hartslane

Ryan Driscoll

University Of The Arts London, Central Saint Martin

Venus

Uranus

The Weird Sisters

Saturn

Mars

Lady of Sorrows

David and Jonathan with the Head of Goliath

Athena and Pallas (death of Pallas)