September 17–20, 2025
Opening Reception: September 18, 6–8 PM
Location: Agora Gallery, 530 W 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
AGI Fine Art is proud to present 45, a solo exhibition by Canadian-born artist Ryan Ratelle, running September 17–20, 2025 at Agora Gallery in Chelsea. The show will feature a curated selection of works that reflect Ratelle’s deeply personal journey, exploring themes of identity, transformation, and resilience.
Ryan Ratelle’s solo exhibition 45 is an exploration of transformation, cultural influence, and lived experience. The number 45—linked to learning, spiritual growth, and completion—becomes both title and metaphor, marking a point of reckoning and renewal in the artist’s practice. Through bold screenprints, paintings, and mixed-media sculptures, Ratelle reclaims narrative space, affirming identity while dismantling the inherited codes of silence from his conservative upbringing in Connecticut.
The works oscillate between the familiar and the experimental, drawing from the aesthetics of Ratelle’s past while pushing toward new forms of self-expression. This interplay produces a body of work that is at once nostalgic and subversive, reimagining traditional portraiture through a distinctly queer lens. Bold colors and stylized forms celebrate LGBTQ+ identity, while nuanced details reveal vulnerability, longing, and resilience.
Ratelle’s screenprints blend photographic intimacy with painterly experimentation, often beginning with photographs he takes himself. Each work is underpainted and layered with vibrant silkscreen, channeling influences from Warhol, Mapplethorpe, and the charged cultural energy of 1980s New York City. Here, desire collides with shame and liberation, creating raw, confrontational works that honor queer visibility and insist on the beauty of living openly.
Many of Ratelle’s paintings fuse the aesthetics of New England folk art—deeply tied to his upbringing—with the energy and subjects of contemporary LGBTQ+ culture. Others mark bold departures, reflecting the artist’s growing desire to experiment and expand stylistically. This duality creates works that both honor tradition and disrupt it, using familiar visual languages to tell stories of identity, belonging, and transformation.
Alongside the two-dimensional works, Ratelle presents sculptural portraits of fellow artists—cast at the exact age they were when immortalized. Titled by age, these pieces become intimate time capsules, preserving not only individual stories but also the collective resilience of LGBTQ+ identity. Each adornment is carefully chosen to reflect the model’s personal journey, transforming the sculptures into layered narratives of vulnerability, strength, and authenticity.
Staging 45 at Agora Gallery in the heart of Chelsea is particularly fitting: a neighborhood that embodies both history and contemporary creativity. Ratelle channels the rebellious spirit of Warhol, Haring, and Mapplethorpe, yet his voice is distinctly contemporary: a celebration of LGBTQ+ identity that is both confrontational and tender, deeply personal and defiantly hopeful.
The timing of the exhibition, coinciding with the Affordable Art Fair, provides an additional opportunity for collectors and art lovers visiting New York to discover Ratelle’s work in a vibrant, international context.
The public is invited to attend the opening reception on September 18, 6–8 PM, where Ryan Ratelle will be present to discuss his work.
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