"Ryan Bock is a searcher. Not only as an artist, but also as an individual. Ryan's intensive search to the roots of his family led him to Germany in 2024, the land of his ancestors. It was a journey into the past and present at the same time: Undoubtedly, an essential part of Ryan Bock's journey of exploration, were the encounters with a wide variety of people, who have known about the lives of deceased ancestors of the Bock family. These conversations and encounters brought the past into the present." ~ Dr Andreas Ay

Composed of eight large and a few small canvases, the series was painted with thick layers of acrylic household paint. Despite their designed appearance and carefully orchestrated compositions, the paintings are not only handmade but freehand. Bock’s customarily muted, grayscale palette—consisting of black-and-white, gray, and dark brown tones—appears in heavily contrasted, hard-edge patterns that are applied with rollers and occasionally interrupted by gestural passages, uneven and textured paint applications, and the visible chalk marks of underdrawing. Graphic and painterly, aggressive and decorative in equal measure, Bock’s work presents a clever and performative play on Western art and its recent history. Ripe with idioms and tropes of the early 20th century avant-gardes and the modernist movements of the interwar years, the paintings’ graphic, ornamental character and often grotesque figures speak to Futurist stage sets and paintings, Czech Cubist art and design, and to the graphic works and films of German expressionism. Bock creates a formally sophisticated pictorial language by referencing the black-and-white crystalline geometry of Czech designer and architect Pavel Janák’s decorative objects; the angular and often grotesque figures of Otto Gutfreund’s sculptures, Josef Čapek’s linocuts, and Käthe Kollwitz’s drawings; and Robert Wiene’s disquieting scenes from the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Lich-cycle also includes quotes to the work of the expressionist silhouette artist and caricaturist Ernst Moritz Engert (1892 – 1986), who died in Lich, as well as to Jacques-Louis David’s canvases of Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801 – 1805), and to Pablo Picasso’s political protest painting Guernica (1937). ~Ágnes Berecz