'The Infinite Worlds of Ryan Gander' - Frieze

“Ryan Gander, whose exhibition ‘Maybe’ opens at Towner Eastbourne next month, has created an aesthetically wide-ranging body of work that is characterized by a quizzical relationship to knowns and unknowns that often engage with the ways children approach the world. Fond of game-like schematics and the catalytic potential for humour to rearrange understanding, he has made many projects that engage with pedagogy and teaching. As well as a professorial role at the Royal Academy, London, he has made several proposals for new schools and educational initiatives, among them a drolly sinister architectural plan for a conjoined art school and art centre based on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, and a more sincere art school initiative named Fairfield International in Suffolk, which became ensnared in bureaucracy and was cancelled before it began.

Gander has also collaborated with his own children in the making of some of his best-known works. The marble sculptures of the series ‘I is…’* (2012–ongoing) are based on the improvised ‘dens’ that his daughter Penny would construct using sheets, umbrellas, chairs and other household objects, calling attention to children’s ability to spontaneously and imaginatively use and misuse the objects around them for play, as well as create curious architectural proposals and formal experiments. Penny has also provided the voices for some of the hesitant animatronic mice that Gander has created since 2018, including Ever After: A Trilogy (I... I... I...) (2019), *which has been in situ at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris since the museum opened in 2021. This particular mouse – a white one with a twitching nose – speaks quietly; she signals that she has something important to say, but is never able to arrive at any solid point or statement (‘Oh … I … um … ’, ‘I say to you that, uh, uh … oh, I don’t know’). Having apparently chewed her way through the wall and into the limelight, she finds that language has failed her.

“What are the unspeakable aspects of the world, and what is the world when it is unspeakable?”

Read the full article for Frieze here.

Shown here: Ryan Gander, ‘Ever After: A Trilogy’ (2018–2020). © The Artist, Courtesy Lisson. Photography by George Darrell.