Thursday 3rd July 2014 – Sunday 14th September 2014 Manchester Art Gallery Mosley Street Manchester M2 3JL
www.manchestergalleries.org
With a presence at Manchester Art Gallery, Castlefield Gallery and, soon, Beswick Library, it’s all about Ryan Gander up north in 2014. And central to this occupation is the survey at the rainy city’s eponymous 19th century civic gallery, the largest iteration of a touring show that comes fresh from FRAC in Paris and will next call at CCA in Derry/Londonderry.
The Gallery in Manchester can boast two advantages over its partner venues: firstly, the busy artist was an undergrad at Manchester Metropolitan University; and secondly, it has an exclusive: a new version of Gander’s several takes on the famous bronze ballerina by Degas. In a contemporary twist on pre-modernity, she climbs down from her plinth and sits looking bored on the edge.
The laconic piece now sits in the entrance hall with a corresponding blue cube which gives a poetic twist to the work, a springboard for the imagination. Gander uses touches like this to elevate his work above what might otherwise at times be a one line gag. He sends your responses skittering off in a multitude of directions often with provocative titles. And this is a show where detail is everything. Don’t miss the invigilators made to read William Morris.
Words Mark Sheerin
About The Artist
Ryan Gander’s complex and unfettered conceptual practice is stimulated by queries, investigations or what-ifs, rather than strict rules or limits. For example, what if a child’s den of sheets were remade in memorialising marble (Tell My Mother not to Worry (ii), 2012)? What if all the pieces in a chess set were remade in Zebra Wood, so that neither side was entirely black nor white (Bauhaus Revisited, 2003)? Gander is a cultural magpie in the widest sense, polymathically taking popular notions apart only to rebuild them in new ways – perhaps by refilming the same ten-second clip 50 times over, as in Man on a Bridge (A study of David Lange), 2008. Language and storytelling play an overarching role in his work, not least in his series of Loose Association lectures or in his attempt to slip a nonsensical, palindromic new word, ‘mitim’, into the English language. Occasionally his ludic concepts drift into more bodily, relational challenges, especially in This Consequence of 2006, that involved the unsettling presence of a gallery owner or invigilator dressed in an all-white Adidas tracksuit, with an additional sinister red stain embroidered into the fabric. Invitation and collaboration are also at the heart of Gander’s fugitive art – whether he’s exchanging fictionalised newspaper obituaries with an artist-friend or taking pictures of people looking at pictures at an art fair – although arguably every solipsistic action he takes merely holds up yet another mirror to his ceaselessly voracious mind.
Ryan Gander, born in Chester in 1976, lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include FRAC Île-de-France / Le Plateau (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2010); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2007 & 2003); MUMOK, Vienna (2007) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007). He has also shown in group exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale (2012); documenta 13, Kassel (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2011); 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008) and the Sydney Biennial (2008). Ryan Gander has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, among others the Zürich Art Prize (2009), the ABN Amro Art Price (2006), the Baloise Art Statements of the Art Basel (2006) and the Dutch Prix de Rome for sculpture (2003).
