Ryan Gander

He was elected Royal Academician in the category of sculpture. Gander's work has been displayed in several countries.

Ryan Gander studied at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and Jan van Eyck Academie. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are Manchester, Amsterdam and London. Work by Ryan Gander is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Tate, Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and M HKA - Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen. Distinctions recorded are Officer of the Order of the British Empire and ABN AMRO Art Award.

• Name — Ryan Gander • Born — 1976 • Birthplace — Chester, Northwest England • Occupation — Artist • Website — frankandeunice.com

Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, northwest England. 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). 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. In 1996, Gander began studying Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, graduating in 1999, and holds an honorary Doctor of the Arts. After graduating from art school, he worked in a carpet shop in Chester for a while, before leaving to study in the Netherlands. Between 1999 and 2000, he studied as a 'Fine Art Research Participant' at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, Netherlands. From 2001-2002, he participated in the artist residency programme of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. 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).

Ryan Gander's body of work is vast, varied and diverse. 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. 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), 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. The work It Came out of Nowhere, he said staring at an empty space (2012) 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), presented an empty room with a light breeze circulating. In 2015, Gander erected "The artist's second phone", 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) 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. Also in 2015, Gander presented Earnest Hawker (2015), his work in which a performer took on the persona of the artist, at the Performa Biennial. At frieze art fair 2019 Time Well Spent (2019) dispensed pebbles for £500 a piece.

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. 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), 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.

Gander believes that everyone makes creative decisions in their daily life and can be a creative artist. 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". 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. 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.

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, 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, 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", 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, a "service" that offered artist-designed Airbnb rooms available to rent cheaply during the British Art Show. 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. 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. The programme included John Akomfrah, Fiona Banner, Simeon Barclay, and Peter Fischli & David Weiss. Other notable shows include: ‘A Video Show’, Solid Haus, Woodbridge, UK (2024); Chester Contemporary, Chester, UK (2023); ‘EVERYTHING BROKEN DOWN’, Solid Haus, Woodbridge, UK (2023); ‘All our stories are incomplete… Colours of the imagination’, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, JP (2022); ‘The Annotated Reader’, Melbourne Art Book Fair, Melbourne, AU; ‘The Annotated Reader’, KRIEG, Hasselt, BE (2021); ‘The Annotated Reader’, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK (2021); ‘Flat Work’, Solid Haus, Woodbridge, UK (2021); ‘All our stories are incomplete… Colours of the imagination’, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, JP (2021); ‘Faces of Picasso: The collection selected by Ryan Gander’, Remai Modern Picasso (2017)

Gander first made an appearance on BBC Two in 2014 on an episode of The Culture Show in episode "The Art of Everything", presented by Miranda Sawyer, explored the extraordinary diversity of Gander's art, spanning sculptures that brushed with art history, chess sets made from car components, creative cocktails and designer trainers. In 2016, BBC Two broadcast Ryan Gander: Living is a Creative Act. In 2017, Gander appeared on Sky Arts' The Art Show. That same year BBC Four presented Ryan Gander: The Idea of Japan, taking him 6000 miles east of his Suffolk studio, to investigate how Japanese visual culture is closely linked to a special relationship with time. This was followed in 2019 by Me, My Selfie and I with Ryan Gander, which investigated the new phenomenon of the selfie. The programme was praised by The Guardians Eleanor Morgan noting that "Gander's lines of questioning make for compelling viewing."

In 2013, Gander and creative consultant Simon Turnbull proposed plans to open Fairfield International, a residential art school in a former primary school in Saxmundham, Suffolk. Modelled on a hybrid of the Dutch academy and artist residency, Fairfield International would provide six residencies a year to hard-up artists in need of a retreat. however, despite raising funds, the project was cancelled in 2015 due to a combination of factors, chiefly the bureaucracy of dealing with the county council over the purchase of the building, and the presence of Japanese Knotweed, which meant insurers could not offer indemnity against the site.

• 2020 IDLES - A HYMN • 2021 JOHN - Šibensko Powerhouse

He was born with a severe brittle bone condition. Gander is a wheelchair user who does not identify as being disabled. He explains: "I don't even feel disabled. I've spent my whole life trying not to be disabled, so I don't want to be labelled a "disabled artist." Gander is married to the former director of the Limoncello gallery, Rebecca May Marston, with whom he has two daughters and one son. In 2024 he donated £40,000 to the Labour Party.

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Gander is a wheelchair user with a long-term physical disability, a severe brittle bone condition which hospitalised him for long periods of time as a child. 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. 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." 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." 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: