An engine beats like a heart, or maybe a heart purrs like an engine. Under the hood, an organ, a pit, perhaps a pearl. Crack open a piece of fruit like a geode and find it cavernous, rotting and iridescent. Laden with a bowling ball, a token of love is too heavy to lift, let alone carry into eternity. Somewhere soft to dream or toss and turn becomes a landscape of jewels, an archway, a slice of bread made inedible by mold or scalding heat. Material, shape, symbol, image—nothing is too solid to destabilize. In her sculptures, Kathleen Ryan pulls everyday objects to the brink of uncanniness, revealing new formal and associative possibilities in turn. Following her first institutional survey at Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kistefos Museum, the nine sculptures in Souvenir present a cross-section of the motifs, techniques, and conceptual decisions integral to Ryan’s entire practice. Desire, novelty, childhood, fantasy, love, and death—the blood and guts of life—are in play here, recast in familiar forms that both are and are not what they seem. 

Souvenir debuts two new bodies of work. The first is a trio of cast-concrete peaches, their pits supplanted by engines. Their polished interiors and unfinished exteriors evoke the contrasting textures of the fruit’s flesh and skin. Heartthrob (all works 2025) is a Ford F-150’s powertrain embedded in a two-ton slice of solid concrete. Partially submerged tangles of wires, rusting cylinders and pistons, and other truck innards feed into its belly like arteries. Heartbreaker and Wild Heart iterate on the same sculptural logic. The latter’s sleek, half-exposed core is culled from a Harley Davidson, its twin cylinders echoing the two-sided structure of that titular organ. These sculptures could be alien or primordial, but their most visceral resemblance is to the human body—itself linked to automobiles through both language (valves, chambers, and so on) and, as Ryan reminds us, form. The peaches’ curves and dimples are stylized, “more emoji than produce aisle,” per the artist. But, as these sculptures attest, symbols drag their previous contexts along with them as they shapeshift. Heartbreaker, Heartthrob, and Wild Heart pulse with all of these intertwined valences: organ, body, car, fruit, pixelated and pop cultural symbols of desire. 

The heart reappears in the second new series in Souvenir: a quartet of rings, versions of the plastic-and-rhinestone variety a child might bring home from a princess-themed party. Their bands, scaled to a waist rather than a finger, retain the seam (known as a “parting line”) and adjustable split of their mass-produced originals. Soda cans cast in iron or aluminum comprise the rings’ studded halo settings, which encircle gems made of candy-colored bowling balls and faceted glass. Jewelry as form and symbolically loaded object is one of Ryan’s longtime motifs. As in previous works, here she teases out jewelry’s sentimental values—as stand-ins for devotion, taste, or generational ties—and upends them through plays of scale and material. Show Pony, Heavy Heart, and Sweet Nothings chart desire lines from adult declarations of love back to the sparkling objects that first teach us how to want. These rings hold nostalgic weight in addition to their literal heft. Heavy associations multiply: an albatross for your finger, my love? 

At the heart of the exhibition is Dreamhouse, a rotting raspberry roughly the size of a minivan. This is the first fruit of its kind in the series for which Ryan is perhaps best known; the Bad Fruit sculptures epitomize the subversive play with material that is the crux of her artistic project. The raspberry’s magenta flesh is composed of a gridlike expanse of plastic beads. The foil to this neat formalism is the mold, ornately rendered in gemstones in a contrasting palette such as lapis lazuli, malachite, and turquoise. Inside the sculpture’s yawning mouth is a glittering interior dripping with stalactites and stalagmites: within this berry is a crystal cave. This transfiguration brings a host of new potential associations—prehistoric, allegorical, and psychoanalytic, to name a few. As she has noted, her large-scale sculptures have an affinity with roadside attractions; the works’ otherworldly proportions also imply a tumble down the proverbial rabbit hole (“EAT ME” is a trick, here, too)—Dreamhouse in particular appears to have been cultivated in an enchanted world. Made over the course of three years, this sculpture draws on multiple fantasies: the decadent home of one’s dreams; Barbie’s plastic monument to an idea of female autonomy; and the cavernous subconscious, visited in sleep and and host to our deepest desires. 

Sunset Strip and Starstruck, too, are rendered in Ryan’s signature tapestry of stones and beads, their spangled arrangement mapping states of decay. But this duo is not fruit: the sculptures register simultaneously as King-sized mattresses and massive slices of pillowy white bread. Their planar surfaces also flirt with painterly language: the crusts double as keyhole arches or windows, framing vistas of the skies at different hours. Sunset Strip’s crystalline mold blooms like clouds flushed by fading light, as seductively composed as a Hollywood backdrop. Toast blackened to a crisp at first glance, Starstruck is also a nocturne, the mantle of agate, amber, and so-called “fool’s gold” among other materials coalescing into a midnight sky. Even as Ryan cultivates these lofty associations (the history of painting, architecture, the heavens) she grounds her sculptures in the mundane. Installed leaning against the wall, Sunset Strip and Starstruck evoke domestic discards, beds propped against a lamppost or slouching over a curb awaiting a ride to oblivion. “I’m not trying to depict things as they actually are,” Ryan has said. Yet for all their metamorphosis, her sculptures present a vision of reality that is all the more vivid for the complexity it reveals.