Ryan Preciado Reimagines Hollyhock House Through Sculpture and Sound
At Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark in Los Angeles, the self-taught artist threads Bauhaus music, Oaxacan weaving, and California car culture through the house’s iconic hollyhock motif
When oil heiress Aline Barnsdall commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design her Los Angeles residence, she asked that the hollyhock—a tall flowering plant known for its vertical stalks lined with large, rounded blossoms—serve as a guiding motif. Wright relocated from Chicago in the 1910s to oversee the project, which Barnsdall envisioned as the centerpiece of a broader cultural complex. Working with Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, he devised a residence that would come to define an emerging strain of California modernism and earn designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Barnsdall’s larger plan for a performing arts campus remains largely unrealized, yet the house endures as a landmark, its abstracted floral pattern coursing through the architecture from colonnade capitals to dining chairs.
The historic residence seems an unconventional, if daunting, site for a contemporary exhibition, yet its layered history did not deter Ryan Preciado, the Los Angeles artist behind “Diary of A Fly,” a solo show on view through April 25. Installed throughout the landmark is a trove of deeply personal works that teeter between art and design, many of which reflect the self-taught sculptor’s Mexican and Chumash identity and celebrate the relationships innate to his approachable yet multifaceted body of work. High-gloss steel sculptures sheathed in automotive paint quite literally reflect his fascination with California car culture. Furnishings inspired by the Memphis Milano movement trace back to the four years Preciado spent assisting in the Echo Park studio of group member Peter Shire, after gallerist and friend Ryan Conder made the introduction. Woven textiles—his first works in the medium—engage the hollyhock’s repeated geometry.
“I wasn’t interested in competing with the house,” Preciado tells Galerie. Instead, the structure sets the tempo. The show’s title references a late-1930s composition by Hungarian pianist Béla Bartók, whose looping, staccato phrases capture the restless motion of a fly ricocheting through space. “Rather than introducing new forms, I was interested in using a gesture I’ve played with in the past and expanding on it—something that could move through the house the way that Wright’s hollyhock patterns do,” he continues. “It became less about placing individual objects and more about creating a sequence of forms that move through the architecture.”
Nowhere does that idea find clearer expression than in the central courtyard, where Preciado has installed the exhibition’s focal work. Titled Eight Different Ways, the steel sculpture mounts elongated petal-shaped components finished in bright yellow paint on a white circular base. Preciado often develops ideas from lingering observations and memories; here, he extends a line of inquiry sparked by a random encounter on the street. He recalls the shape left after a construction worker sliced through green mesh fencing. “I was locked out of my shop and driving around when I pulled over and talked to this kid who was working,” he explains. “We started talking about why he does that and what other types of cuts he makes.” He introduced the worker to Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases, an exchange that stuck with him and soon evolved into a distilled gesture that threads through the work on display.
The tapestries bring that inquiry into brilliant focus. Preciado wrestled with how to extend the hollyhock-derived shapes into another medium before arriving at fiber, uncharted territory for his practice. “I wasn’t sure what that would look like at first,” he says. After sharing drawings that riffed on the forms with artists Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman, he turned to weaving. “We started talking about textiles and it immediately felt right,” recalls Preciado, a longtime admirer of Anni Albers, whose bold color fields and later embrace of irregular, biomorphic shapes are perceptible in the end result.
To realize the tapestries, Preciado traveled to Oaxaca to work side-by-side with the Hernandez family of third-generation Zapotec weavers. The works crystallized through a close exchange of knowledge as they dyed the fabrics and worked at the loom, Preciado learning through repetition. “I liked the idea of using craft and labor to build a two-dimensional work,” he says. “The courtyard piece is spatial, but the tapestries allowed that same gesture to be flattened. They became less illustrations of the sculpture and more as field notes of time spent making it.”
Echoing the show’s musical threads, Preciado titled the tapestry series In a Flat Field after the debut album by English goth rock band Bauhaus, which played on repeat in his studio during their making. “Sometimes, certain songs feel connected to what’s happening in the studio,” he says. “Music doesn’t dictate the work, but it creates an atmosphere of daydreaming.”
As does collaboration. For the show, Preciado invited composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt to create music for a performance on Hollyhock House’s piano, with a recording available on lathe-cut records. “Conversation and friendship are a natural part of how I think about shows,” Preciado says. “Though the work originates from my studio and woodshop, it’s often shaped by relationships and influences around me.” To wit, works by other artists appear in the house, including painter Matt Connors, with whom Preciado shared an exhibition at Canada Gallery in New York. “It felt right to put another voice in the house,” he says, noting Barnsdall’s original vision for Hollyhock House as a site of artistic exchange. “It creates a larger dialogue.”
The occasion also prompted Preciado to grapple with an architectural legacy that informed a previous body of work. For a 2024 solo exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum, he invoked the story of Manuel Sandoval, a 20th-century Nicaraguan-American carpenter who collaborated with prominent architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, yet held an ambivalent view of those relationships and received little credit for his contributions. At Hollyhock House, Wright departed from the Prairie Style architecture he established in the Midwest and sought inspiration from pre-Hispanic precedents, drawing on sacred sites such as the Palace at Palenque in Southern Mexico. The house’s cast-concrete ornament, with its dense, repeating relief, recalls the carved facades of Maya architecture.
That convergence of references is inextricable from Preciado’s approach. He treats the site as a place where histories and influences coexist, each one free to simply hang out. In the courtyard, the center sculpture could be read as a bloom—a marker of the relationships that continue to define and lend depth to his craft. “I like the idea that the show can operate like a small ecosystem,” he says. “Different practices, materials, and rhythms all in the same space.”