Ryan Gander was born in Chester, England in 1976. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, the Netherlands and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.

Gander’s work is very diverse and includes installation, performance, painting, publishing, design and curating. A common thread through his practice is an impulse for storytelling, with works often serving as clues to complex narratives.  

His works, The Fourth Baron Egerton’s 16 Plumed Bird of Paradise and A History Unfolds/A Legacy Unravels (all 2010) relate to the same story – the ‘forged’ discovery of a new species of tropical bird by two English gentlemen, Baron Egerton and Sir Sebastian Lawes. The works were originally created for an exhibition at the National Trust property, Tatton Hall in Cheshire, once the home of Baron Egerton: they comprise a taxidermal bird; a historical photograph of the bird in situ at Tatton Hall; and two newspaper articles (one historical and one recent) relating to the bird’s story. Although presented together as a historical record, there is an ambiguity as to whether the tale is a matter of fact or fiction. The blurring of the boundary between real and imaginary is frequently at play in Gander’s work, which employs visual trickery and misdirection, or what the artist calls ‘exercise for the imagination’.

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Photograph

    A permanent image taken by means of the chemical action of light on light-sensitive surfaces.