Early life and education
Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, northwest England. [1] His father worked as a planning engineer on the commercial gearbox line at Vauxhall Motors in Ellesmere Port, Liverpool (a fact about which he would later make work). [3] Gander's mother worked initially as a teacher and then as an inspector for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. Gander became interested in art after being taken to one of the early British Art Shows by his father. [4]
In 1996, Gander began studying Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, [1] graduating in 1999, [5] and holds an honorary Doctor of the Arts. [1] After graduating from art school, he worked in a carpet shop in Chester for a while, before leaving to study in the Netherlands. [5]
Between 1999 and 2000, he studied as a 'Fine Art Research Participant' at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, Netherlands. [1] From 2001-2002, he participated in the artist residency programme of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. [1] In 2004, he was made Cocheme Fellow at Byam Shaw School of Art, London.
It was winning the 2005 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel for the presentation of his video work Is this Guilt in You Too (The Study of a Car in a Field) that launched Gander's career as an artist, winning a cash prize of CHF 30,000 (Swiss francs). [6]
Work
Ryan Gander's body of work is vast, varied and diverse. [7] His work is not invested in any single medium or style, he has cultivated a "non-style" that enables him to pursue ideas across many traditionally understood artistic media. [7] However, across this work there are preoccupations that Gander returns to: legacies of modernist design, aesthetic value, creativity and education, para-possible and fictional (utopian and dystopian) worlds, and the relationship between art and design. This approach is exemplified in his major commission with Artangel titled Locked Room Scenario (2011), [8] in which the visitor enters a totally designed office space in a former trading depot where they are invited to solve the mystery of a group show of fictionalised artists, including their work, to which they are denied access. [8]
The work It Came out of Nowhere, he said staring at an empty space (2012) [9] is a Comme des Garçons document wallet made collaboratively with the artist Jonathan Monk. His series of works titled Device #5 (2005) might be functional devices but actually are not. His installation at dOCUMENTA (13) titled I need some meaning I can memorise (The Invisible Pull) (2012), [10] presented an empty room with a light breeze circulating.
In 2015, Gander erected "The artist's second phone", [11] a giant billboard installed outside Lisson Gallery, London, which borrows the aesthetic of vacant Mexican billboards to announce his phone number to all passing. The series of works "A lamp made by the artist for his wife" (2013) [12] are ad hoc combinations of products available from most hardware stores to produce a functioning item of furniture. Recently, Gander has increasingly used vending machines to distribute works. At frieze art fair 2019 Time Well Spent (2019) dispensed pebbles for £500 a piece. [13]
Collision and association
Gander's fascination with techniques of creative and associative collisions is evident in his earliest 'Loose Association' public lecturers, begun in 2002, and published together in 2007 as the book Loose Associations and Other Lectures. [14] These lectures range across material, from meditations on the film Back to the Future to the writing of Italo Calvino, modernism to children's books. Motifs of association and collision are evident across his works and he has explored techniques of association used by earlier modernist artists and architects, notably Luis Barragán and Ernö Goldfinger. With the sculptural series The Way Things Collide (2012–ongoing), [15] Gander collides two elements that are hardest to be associated logically with the human mind, each is a game, a challenge, with narrative consequences. A knotted condom is left on a USM cabinet; a skate wing rests on a suitcase; a macaroon balances on a stool. These are experiments in minimum constituents of narrative. [15]
Creativity
Gander believes that everyone makes creative decisions in their daily life and can be a creative artist. [16] These everyday acts of creativity, he argues, are often more exciting than the creative artworks of celebrated contemporary artists, whose repetition of a successful formula is contrary to creativity. Art for Gander is about "trying to make some original contribution to human history and knowledge, like an explorer". [4]
To avoid habitualised ways of working, Gander has looked to children's creativity, frequently collaborating with his daughters to realise artworks. Likewise, since the early 2000s he has used an array of pseudonyms to produce work outside of his typical concerns. These fictional characters spread across an increasingly growing web of citation and cross-reference, self-corroborating and self-sustaining fictional and possible historical events. In 2014, Gander told an interviewer that: 'I hope my work is [...] expansive or "multiplicit" (that is not a word but it should be). An objective is that the work has more end points than starting points – like a 1970s children's 'Choose your own adventure story''. [17] An influential book Gander has referred to in several interviews is Edward Packer's Choose Your Own Adventure books, first published in 1976, and marketed to 10 to 14 year olds. In these books the reader begins at page one, follows instructions at the foot of the page to turn to page two, from where instructions at the foot of that page motivates a decision that splits the narrative. [18]
Gander is a wheelchair user with a long-term physical disability, [19] a severe brittle bone condition which hospitalised him for long periods of time as a child. [20] In 2006, his installation at the old Whitechapel Library, Is this Guilt in you too?, where he filled the space with obstacles, detritus, dead ends, and illusions meant to confound visitors and symbolize the inequitable difficulties faced by disabled people, was part of the Arts Council England's Adjustments exhibitions whose aim was "to address transitional thinking on disability, equality and inclusion". His work for the 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition featured an action-figure sized sculpture that represents him while he falls from a wheelchair. [21]
Despite various interviews and works made in which Gander explicitly states he does not understand himself to be disabled or "differently abled" to anyone else, his work is interpreted, often by able-bodied commentators, as that of a disabled artist. The curator Matthew Higgs, for example, has argued that his disability contributes to his unique way of seeing: "The first thing I ever noticed about Ryan was that he uses a wheelchair. I mention this not in passing, nor as a gratuitous aside. Whilst I accept that some people might argue that this information is irrelevant, I would like to think that the fact that Ryan uses a wheelchair does – at least – have some bearing on my subsequent understanding of his work." [22]
In recent years, Gander has felt compelled to address his disability in order to correct other people's perception of his exceptionalism as a wheelchair user. In the BBC television programme Me, My Selfie and I with Ryan Gander, broadcast in 2019, Gander met a transhumanist who suggests that him he might be "improved" too by replacing his legs with bionic ones modelled on cheetahs. Gander replies: "Being in a wheelchair doesn't affect my view on the world. In an age where everyone identifies with being different, I am someone who actually can't walk and don't associate with being disabled. I don't tick the Arts Council funding box that says 'disabled' because I don't identify ... I don't want cheetah legs. I don't know any cheetahs." [23] [24]
In his work The End (2020) an animatronic mouse poking its head through a gallery wall it's burrowed through elaborates further on the capturing of difference, voicing the opinion of the artist:
Difference has become a currency of sorts. I happen to have been born with a great difference to most, and one that is visually recognisable at that. A curse to some, but a blessing to others. To me, it is neither. I am not sure how or when, but at some point, I just chose not to identify with my difference. I chose to ignore it, not in the hope that it would go away, but in the hope that being different would not consume my time and energy that could be better spent doing all the good stuff in the world. [25]
Public sculpture
In 2010, Gander's sculpture The Happy Prince was commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Central Park, New York City. [26] This concrete resin sculpture presented the ruin of the fictional statue from the final chapter in Oscar Wilde's children's book The Happy Prince (1888). [26]
In 2012, Gander was commissioned to produce Escape hatch to Culturefield, [27] situated within a wooded area of the Karlslaue Park, Kassel, Delaware, as part of dOCUMENTA 13. [27] Off the park's designated paths, a trapdoor fabricated from iron and concrete appeared to lead to an underground series of tunnels of some kind. The hatch, visibly partially open so that the spectator might partially peer inside, showed ladder rungs leading down. [27]
The same year, 2012, Gander's created It's got such good heart in it was commissioned by Mexico City Zoo, and located in the 'activity centre' for lions. [28] Based on Sol LeWitt's open cube structure, and the story that LeWitt allowed his cats to use his redundant sculpture, upscaled and added to, it was offered as a climbing frame and scratching post for lions. [28]
In 2018, Gander produced two public artworks, the first sited outside BALTIC gallery, Newcastle, [29] titled To Give Light (Northern Aspirational Charms). [29] Ten minimal, simplified forms based on ten objects originally designed to emit or shine light were cast in black concrete and arranged chronologically in a circular configuration. Each element featured three links of mooring chain attached, implying a nautical functionality as well as alluding to trinkets on an oversized charm bracelet. [29]
Later in 2018, outside The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial. [30] his work titled Time Moves Quickly, [30] consisted of five public artworks, functional as benches, placed in a circle in the public square outside the cathedral. Each artwork was enlarged and reproduced from a maquette made by a child from Knotty Ash Primary using building blocks that, when rearranged, made a model of the cathedral. [31]
In 2019, Gander was commissioned to produce a public sculpture by Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Titled The Green & The Gardens, [32] Gander led a concept that transformed the space into a green heart of the campus, a shared place for everyone. [32] In collaboration with Gillespies, landscape architects, they developed the design, selected the planting, furniture and lighting. Gander integrated sculptural elements: coloured tents that glow at night, an open gateway, a stile, and a community noticeboard. [32]
Gander's 2022 sculpture titled We are only human (Incomplete sculpture for Scraborough to be finished by snow) was created in the shape of a dolos using a computer program to simulate snowfall. By subtracting the volume of snow from the sculpture's original shape, Gander created an artwork that would only be ‘finished’ when it snows, pointing to weather changes caused by global warming. The sculpture was cast in ultra-low carbon concrete and incorporated limestone formed from shells and skeletons of prehistoric sea creatures. [33] The piece will be based at Scarborough Castle for 10 years through 2032, a period that scientists indicate as being "crucial in reducing carbon emissions before global warming hits a tipping point and becomes irreversible." [34]
Other public artworks include: Ghost Ship (2022) in Sunderland City Centre, UK; [35] Our Long Dotted Line (or 37 years previous) (2021) at Space K, Korea; [36] The day to day accumulation of hope, failure and ecstasy – The zenith of your career (The Last Degas) (2017), [37] exhibited in the gardens of The Contemporary Austin Commission (USA), in late Autumn, 2018; Because editorial is costly (2016), [38] a giant, swollen, mirror-finish stainless steel version of "Rapport de volumes" (1919) by Georges Vantongerloo in a crater as if crash landed exhibited during the Okayama Art Summit (JP); [39] Dad's Halo Effect (2014), [40] three polished stainless steel sculptures initially conceived by the artist's father when he worked at General Motors in the 1980s, and based on parts of the steering mechanism of a commercial Bedford truck, re-imagined by the artist from his father's verbal description; No political motivation (2011), a faithful reproduction of the revolving New Scotland Yard sign constructed to display the words 'THE WORLD S FAIR', incorrectly typeset with a half space between the characters 'D' and 'S' – meaning the sign could be interpreted in one of two differing ways, as an advertisement for an event or as a political slogan.. [41]
Curatorial
Gander has curated, by himself and in collaboration, numerous exhibitions, including, notably, "The way in which it landed" at Tate Britain, London, UK in 2008, [42] featuring Lucy Clout, Nathaniel Mellors, Aurelien Froment, David Renggli, and Carol Bove; 'Young British Art' at Limoncello, London, UK in 2011 featuring 70 emerging artist; "Night in the Museum" to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Arts Council collection, [43] which toured to The Attenborough Centre, Leicester, UK, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, UK, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK; 'The Greatest Story Ever Told', The National Museum of Art Osaka, Osaka, JP in 2017; Knock Knock at South London Gallery, London, UK, 2018. "The Annotated Reader", [44] a publication and exhibition, curated with art critic Jonathan P. Watts, is touring the world. In 2016, Gander also collaborated with Watts on "general studies" at OUTPOST, Norwich, [45] a "service" that offered artist-designed Airbnb rooms available to rent cheaply during the British Art Show. [45]
In 2020, Gander founded Solid Haus, a new Kunsthalle-like contemporary art space situated in rural Suffolk, two hours east of London. Situated within his studio complex, Solid Haus made positive use of an era of lockdown with an intention of hosting impromptu projects by both emerging and established artists. [46]
In September 2023, Gander was invited to curate the inaugural Chester Contemporary, an ambitious international cultural event that makes and shows relevant, distinctive, contemporary art alongside a programme of events that respond to the city's unique places and spaces, its history and its characters. Chester Contemporary features work by acclaimed UK artists and supports emerging artists at a pivotal point in their career to make new and ambitious projects. [47] The programme included John Akomfrah, Fiona Banner, Simeon Barclay, and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.
