Ryan Steadman

Ryan Steadman is a painter, writer, and curator who lives and works in Delhi, New York, in the Great Western Catskills. Born in 1974 in Greenville, South Carolina, he earned his BFA from the University of Georgia in Athens and his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He spent years in New York City before moving upstate, writing regularly for Artforum and Modern Painters. He later served as curatorial advisor to the UNTITLED. Art Fair in Miami Beach and organized exhibitions of his own in Boston and New York.

Steadman's paintings are spare and graphic in composition, built from flat planes of color, yet worked and reworked on the surface in a way that can feel almost sculpted. He returned to figurative painting in 2020 after a twelve year absence, a shift that coincided with his move out of New York City into the relative isolation of the Catskills. That change reoriented his work around his immediate surroundings: his children, his partner, the landscape, and the animals that share it with him, including horses, dogs, and cats. Rather than treat animals as incidental subjects or naturalist studies, Steadman paints them as an extension of the landscape and a bridge between the human and non-human world, drawn to the ways animals mirror us even as their differences remain plain.

He often revisits a canvas over months or years, treating the editing process itself as part of what makes each painting a singular object rather than the product of a repeatable formula. Themes shift depending on where he is in life, but he returns again and again to a version of the world that mirrors the real one while foregrounding his own tastes and feelings. Parenthood, in particular, has shaped how he observes and records what is around him, sharpening his sense that full objectivity is impossible and that his own biases, when acknowledged, can enrich the work rather than limit it.

Steadman has held solo and two-person exhibitions at Karma in New York; Halsey McKay Gallery in Brooklyn and East Hampton, New York; Wilder Gallery in London; and Europa in New York, among other venues, and his group exhibition history includes Nathalie Karg Gallery, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, and Vardan Gallery in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The East Hampton Star, Modern Painters Magazine, and Time Out New York, among other publications.