RYAN GANDER ITW
Lee Johnson talks to Ryan Gander at Frieze Art Fair 2009
Ryan Gander is one of the most exciting young Artists to emerge from London in the past few years. Born in the UK in 1976, Gander studied Interactive Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, followed by a post-graduate in Fine Art at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Gander has exhibited widely and internationally, with a solo show in 2008 at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, which travelled to the South London Gallery and Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam. Exhibitions of note in 2009 include Gander’s solo exhibition The Die is Cast, at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Nice, and a group show curated by Richard Wentworth titled From Boule to Braid at the Lisson Gallery. Gander has also had solo shows at the Stedelijk Bureau in Amsterdam in 2003 and 2007, and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco in 2007.
Gander has won numerous prestigious awards including; the 2008 Paul Hamlyn Award; the 2003 Prix de Rome for sculpture, and the 2006 Baloise Art Statements Prize at Basel Art Fair.
Gander’s practice encompasses an incredibly wide range of media including; sculpture, photography, painting, film, intervention and the printed word. He has lectured widely and has also curated exhibitions at Tate Britain (The way in which it landed, Art Now, 2008) and the International 3 Gallery in Manchester (Now then now then, 2004).
I caught up with Gander at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, where he is exhibiting this year in the Lisson Gallery stand, as well as Frieze Projects. Gander was also one of only seven artists selected for this year’s Frieze Projects. Frieze Projects provides a unique opportunity for the chosen few artists to realise their vision in the context of an internationally respected art fair. This year Mike Bouchet’s installation consisted of a motivational speaker; Ruth Ewan broadcast a collection of political songs named ‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World’ at Frieze via the radio station ‘Resonance FM’; Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth filmed Actors on CCTV, and screened the resulting footage within a curtained room; Monika Sosnowska’s intervention consisting of objects penetrating the roof of the Frieze pavilion was removed at the eleventh hour at the request of the Artist; Per-Oscar Leu arranged a seemingly impossible post-humus booking signing by Kafka; and Stephanie Syjco created a buzzy workshop full of fake artworks, which were copied by a group of artists from exhibits in the fair.
However Gander was the only artist to have the genius concept of inverting the usual relationship of art buyer/ lover and artist, by making the visitor the subject of his artwork. He achieved this by asking visitors to Frieze to choose their favourite artwork, then photographing them admiring it. In so doing the lover of the artwork becomes the subject of a new and unique work of art. The resulting monochrome portraits were printed out digitally, and hung along the corridor at the entrance of Frieze, overlooking visitors to the Fair.
Read the interview at Whitehot magazine
Extracted from Whitehot magazine
