Ryan Gander

Ryan Gander OBE RA (born 1976) is a British artist.

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.

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.

From 2001-2002, he participated in the artist residency programme of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

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.

Since 2003, Gander has produced a body of artworks in different forms, ranging from sculpture, apparel, writing, architecture, painting, typefaces, publications, and performance.

Additionally, Gander curates exhibitions, has worked as an educator at art institutions and universities, and has written 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-conceptualist, Proper-'Gander'-ist, amateur philosopher".

He was elected Royal Academician in the category of sculpture.

Gander's work has been displayed in several different countries.

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.

His series of works titled Device #5 (2005) might be functional devices but actually are not.

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 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.

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.

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.

In 2014, Gander told an interviewer that: 'I hope my work is [...] expansive or "multiplicit" (that is not a word but it should be).

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.

At frieze art fair 2019 Time Well Spent (2019) dispensed pebbles for £500 a piece.