(Booth B19)
Miami Art Week
12/03/24 - 01/08/24
Ryan Bock x James Reyes
Join us at SCOPE Art Show (Booth B19) for a special feature of two of our favorite contemporary artist, both of whom we have been working and growing with for over a decade. This booth marks the reuniting and celebration of two artist and friends that have not shown side by side since the infamous Base 12 exhibitions including guerrilla pop ups a The Whitney, MoMA PS1 and the MTA.
James Reyes
James Reyes (b. 1991, Bronx, New York) is an American painter whose work explores the tension between figuration and abstraction through gesture-driven mark-making, incorporating moments of realism. Shaped by his cultural and social environment, Reyes develops compositions that balance immediacy and control, allowing figures and creatures to emerge, dissolve, and reassert themselves within dense, layered surfaces.
Reyes received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2014. Early in his career, he was involved in artist-led, experimental exhibition models that emphasized accessibility and public engagement, including unsanctioned installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and New York City subway stations. These formative experiences continue to inform his approach to painting, which embraces risk, physicality, and improvisation.
Working across a range of scales and mediums, Reyes’s figures often appear simultaneously complete and fragmented, occupying a space between the recognizable and the surreal. This push and pull—between structure and collapse, image and gesture—serves as a throughline across his bodies of work.
Reyes’s work has been shown nationally and internationally and is held in private and institutional collections, including Mana Contemporary. His paintings will also enter the permanent collection of a museum scheduled to open in Baltimore in 2026.
Ryan Bock
Ryan Bock (b.1989) specializes in painting, drawing, puppetry, animation and experimental film methods. Bock’s practice is rooted in a need for narrative structure. Residing somewhere between mythology and nightmare, Bock depicts mise-en-scène riddled with symbology and allusions both cinematic and painterly. Maintaining a fascination for shape, shade, shadow, structure and optical illusion, Bock deconstructs his subject matter into often barely-recognizable delineations and structurally unsound repetitive patterns. In an attempt to confront the contemporary individual’s relationship to mortality, fear and superstition, Bock depicts correlations between the human figure and its innovations: technology, architecture and religion—both historically and fictitiously. By consistently contrasting historical subjects with those of the present, and using the recurring patterns found to generate predictions about our future—a process he refers to as ‘dusty futurism’—Bock propels his audience to reconsider the routine human experience and discloses the illusions implemented to keep them from questioning.