Ryan Gander exhibition ‘Fieldworks 2015’ at the Lisson Gallery, London.

David Franchi – Monday, 2^nd November 2015.

Never enough, 2015 co. Lisson Gallery, London © Ryan Gander

The Ryan Gander exhibition ‘Fieldworks 2015’ at the Lisson Gallery, London, was very interesting.

It was the third time Ryan Gander made an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, London. It can be described by illustrating the works displayed.

The most attention-grabbing was Fieldworks 2015 itself. It took up the full back gallery. It consisted in a window opening on a revolving conveyer belt, on which were standing various objects coming from the artist’s collection – each apparently found but deeply examined individually crafted. It created a memory game of bizarre relations and a prism of connections.

‘Preparation is everything (There will come a slowness and we should prepare for that also)’ was an autobiographical work, made up of 365 daily efforts to find out the precise colour of the sky over Saxmundham, Suffolk, in acrylic paint.

The out of the ordinary installation ‘Never enough’ was set up by filling the whole basement space with pebbles. Referring to the panorama near Gander’s home, it is inspired to a supposed punishment for criminal perpetrators of smuggling.

In the meantime, ‘The artist’s second phone’ was a giant billboard installed outside the gallery with the real phone number of Gander.

In the courtyard space was installed ‘Night and Day’ an inside lit semi-transparent two-man tent crafted out of fibreglass resin.

Ryan Gander was born in Chester in 1976 and works in London. He is a conceptual artist, who finds inspiration in questions, study or what-ifs, rather than austere conventions or limits. He takes popular notions and restructures them by playing with storytelling and language.

Latest solo exhibitions include Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2015); Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2015); Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2015); Make Every Show Like it’s Your Last, Manchester Art Gallery (2014), touring to Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry (2014) and OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz (2015); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2010); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); MUMOK, Vienna (2007) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007).

Gander received many awards, including 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).

The exhibition ‘Ryan Gander: Fieldwork 2015’ was at the Lisson Gallery, London, from 25th September until 31st October 2015.