Ryan Gander

Ryan Gander OBE RA (1976, Chester, UK) lives and works in Suffolk and London. Over the past two decades, Gander has established an international reputation through a vast and pluralistic body of artworks that materialize in many different forms, ranging from sculpture, apparel and writing to architecture, painting, typefaces, publications and performance. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander's work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork. His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, a network with multiple connections, the fragments of an embedded story, a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own connections and invent their own narrative in order to solve the charade with its many solutions. 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'.

Gander studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL, and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, NL. He has been a Professor of Visual Art at the Universities of Huddersfield and Suffolk, holds honorary doctorates from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Suffolk, and was awarded an OBE for services to contemporary arts in 2017. In 2019 he received the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. In 2022 he was elected Royal Academician for the category of Sculpture.

Recent solo exhibitions include 'THIS IS FEELING ALL OF IT', Esther Schipper, Berlin (2025); 'Grunts, hoots, whimpers, barks and screams', Helga de Alvear, Cáceres (2025); 'PUNTO!', Lisson Gallery, London (2024); 'I'm at 4%', Annet Gelink, Amsterdam (2024); 'The Markers of Our Time', Tokyo Opera City Gallery, Tokyo (2023); 'The 500 Million Year Collaboration', Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2022); 'Some Other Life', Esther Schipper, Berlin (2022); and 'Once upon a bicycle, not so long ago', Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2013).

Major group exhibitions and projects include 'Blind Man's Bluff', Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2022); 'NGV Triennial 2023', National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023); ILLUMInations, 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2011); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); 'Intervals', Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); and Liverpool Biennial (2018) and Sydney Biennale (2018).

Gander's work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Collection, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MCA Chicago; and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, among others.