"a seasonal twinge for sex that comes right before the hibernation of winter..."

"a tree with over-ripe fruits or cocoons that weren't able to open, looking like naturally they were supposed to fall off but never did and kind of spoiled..."


Matthew Ronay has created Adorn Their Sermons, 2007, a humorous sculpture with some distinctive hints at sexual repression and proverbial wet dreams. The sculpture is a mobile of four brightly painted jack-o-lantern heads suspended in black fishnet stockings, with a fifth head ripped from its net and laying shattered on the floor below. Pseudo-testicular shapes dangle in the air above the viewer's head, clearly pregnant with metaphor. Provocative thoughts of child's play, sexual ennui, chutzpah, and the ever-present unhinged dreamlike narrative found in many of the artist's other sculptures occur. The shattered pumpkin, an event, missed, yet alive with recent activity...

Matthew Ronay has had recent one person exhibitions at Vacio 9, Madrid, Spain; Parasol Unit, London, England; rec., Berlin, Germany; and Art Statements, Art Basel, Switzerland, among numerous gallery exhibitions. Group exhibitions have included The Incomplete, Chelsea Art Museum, NY; Make It Now: New Sculpture in New York, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium, Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, traveled to Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, the Center of Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY and the Reyjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik; Monuments for the USA, CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; 2004 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Artists Imagine Architecture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Sudden Glory: Sight Gags and Slapstick in Contemporary Art, Logan Gallery, CCAC Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; Now Is The Time, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY; and Boomerang: Collector's Choice, Exit Art, NY among many others. Matthew Ronay is represented in New York by Andrea Rosen Gallery.