Ryan Gander RA (b. 1976)

Ryan Gander is an artist living and working in Suffolk, UK. Over the past two decades, Gander has established an international reputation through a vast and pluralistic body of artworks that materialise in many different forms, ranging from sculpture, apparel and writing to architecture, painting, typefaces, publications and performance. As well as curating exhibitions, he is a committed educator, having taught at international art institutions and universities, and has written and edited a variety of books and presented television programmes on and about contemporary art and culture for the BBC.

Gander is typically described as a conceptual artist, but this is a term he has refuted, referring instead to himself as ‘a sort of neo-conceptual no-style-style amateur philosopher’. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork. His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, a network with multiple connections, the fragments of an embedded story, a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own connections and invent their own narrative in order to solve the charade with its many solutions, staged by the artist.

Gander studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, NL. The artist has been a Professor of Visual Art at the University of Huddersfield and holds an honorary Doctor of the Arts at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Suffolk. In 2017 he was awarded an OBE for services to contemporary arts. In 2019 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

Major projects and commissions include Kunsthalle Bern, CH; Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris; Space K, Seoul; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Café Aubette, Strasbourg; Musée d‘art Contemporain de Montréal; Aspen Art Museum; Liverpool Biennial; Sydney Biennale; Performa, NY; High Line, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; Locked Room Scenario, commissioned by Artangel, London; 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Intervals at The Guggenheim Museum, NY; Public Art Fund, NY.