Ryan Mendoza's been painting for ten years now and there's not a nice
landscape or flower arrangement in the lot. He's a strictly dark kind of guy: paedophilia, S&M, hardcore bondage, and white trash — the swarthy truths of existence, compiling evidence of a basic nature. The most
disturbing thing, however, about Ryan Mendoza's paintings is that they are paintings. The pictures taken from Internet homepages, snapshots of friends, photos of people who are dead. Images of American bourgeois malaise, immediately banal and disposable, they have a biographical nostalgia more intimate than pornography. A conscious-less honesty which hits like a brick. As photos, they probably wouldn't be given a second thought. As paintings these images become epic.
— Patricia Ellis


Selected solo exhibitions: 2002: Castel Nuovo, Naples; Klüser 2, Munich; White Cube, London; 2001: Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lübeck; 2000: MART, Trento; Bernd Klüser, Munich; Massimo Minini, Brescia; 1999: Klüser, Munich; 1998: Studio Cannaviello, Milan.