Ryan Gander

Ryan Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, England. He received his First Class Degree, BA (Hons) in Interactive Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and was a Post-Graduate Fine Art Participant at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. The artist lives and works between Suffolk and London.

Gander has been invited to teach and lecture at numerous institutions, such as the AA School of Architecture, London; Barbican, London; Barnard College, New York, and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.

Gander has been awarded numerous prizes including: the 2010 Zurich Art Prize, the 2006 ABN Amro Art Prize, and the 2003 Dutch Prix de Rome for Sculpture. In 2015, he received the honorary degree Doctor of Arts of the Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2017 he was awarded an OBE (Order of British Empire) for services to contemporary art. In 2022 he was elected as Royal Academician.

Ryan Gander’s oeuvre evokes fictional spaces, institutions and figures. His work is extremely varied, unified more by a conceptual vision than by formal appearance. It often combines fictional presence and absences, creating objects that refer to events, other absent objects, art works or persons, both real and imaginary. The voids or absences, evoked by the suggestion of missing items either named, delineated or circumscribed by traces, act as witty, sometimes lyrical invocations of the power of imagination. His attention is often focused on the playfulness and imagination of children, which is often more expansive and less restrictive than adult behavior, less encumbered by “reality”, facts and appearances.