Born in Chester in 1976 and now based in London and Suffolk, Ryan Gander has achieved international recognition for a prolific and diverse body of work embracing a vast range of media, from sculpture and installation, to books and games, even the attempt to introduce a new word and the creation of a unique range of sportswear.

Gander deliberately avoids a signature style, preferring instead to remain open to limitless possibilities, unpicking myths and creating new associations, all with a mischievous playfulness, a deadpan wit and a fascination for storytelling.

Ryan Gander has shown internationally, most recently as part of the British Art Show 8, and he has been the subject of high profile solo exhibitions including Make every show like it's your last, which opened at Manchester City Art Gallery, UK and toured to Derry, Linz, Vancouver and Aspen. His works are included in major national and international collections, including the Tate Collection, London, the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and MacBA, Barcelona.

As old as time itself, slept alone (2016) by Ryan Gander is one of eight new works commissioned by the Arts Council Collection to mark its seventieth anniversary year. The work is the latest in a series that began in 2008, inspired by The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (1880-81) by Edgar Degas. Originally made out of wax, Degas’ seminal sculpture of a young dancer, two-thirds life size, was cast in bronze after the artist’s death and acquired by museums and galleries across the world. Gander began to seek out the ballerina on his many trips to museums and galleries and became fascinated by her melancholic stance, her youthful body tethered by the ‘ball and chain’ of her plinth.

In Gander’s series of work, the dancer, wearing a modern-day leotard rather than a tutu, is set free to explore the art institution. Presented as a single bronze edition, she is always accompanied by her white plinth and a blue cube, which for Gander represents the realm of contemporary art. In As old as time itself, slept alone (2016), the little dancer lies asleep on the floor, exhausted by her explorations of the contemporary art gallery. She finds shelter by the large blue cube, and keeps close by her little white plinth, which has shrunk to a toy-like scale. Despite her seemingly temporary freedoms, the fact remains that the little dancer is cast in bronze, trapped forever in museological captivity.

Night in the Museum: Ryan Gander Curates the Arts Council Collection, an ACC Touring Exhibitions, is currently on display at The Attenborough Centre, Leicester, until 21 May 2017.
 

In his major retrospective ‘Maurizio Cattelan: All’ at the Guggenheim Museum New York in 2011, Cattelan rejected a conventional display, in order to question traditional practices in his usual anarchic and experimental manner.

Instead he chose to suspend a waterfall of objects from the ceiling including 'Him', a sculpture of a penitent Hitler; a slumped taxidermy donkey and an engorged statue of Picasso, all hanging like a surrealist chandelier through the centre of the gallery's iconic spiral staircase.

In the early 1990’s Cattelan founded a football team made up of of North African immigrants. The Arts Council Collection’s small-scale sculpture AC Forniture Sud shows a team line up of all black African players with the sponsor’s logo ‘Rauss’ emblazoned on their chests. ‘Rauss’ is derived from a Nazi slogan meaning to ‘get out.’ This highly-politicised sculpture utilises the aspirational and nationalistic model of a football team to highlight contemporary prejudices around immigration.

The artist links the abhorrent treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany with contemporary treatment of immigrants in Italy showing that xenophobia is not consigned to the dark periods of history. As in his exhibition at the Guggenheim, Cattelan defies convention to presents a bold and concise statement, albeit on a vastly different scale.

AC Forniture Sud can be see at the Walker Art Gallery as part of our National Partnership Programme exhibition, Transparency, until 18 June.

For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the ‘eye of the storm’.

She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.

Her installation, Neither From Nor Towards, 1992, features bricks from a row of houses that fell off the white cliffs of Dover. Found by the artist on a remote shoreline between Folkestone and Dover, the bricks have been shaped by the crashing waves over many years. Parker was fascinated by the drama, describing the process as a 'perfect cartoon death'. She suspended the bricks on wires from the gallery ceiling to form a house shape. It is difficult to tell if the artist has represented the house mid-fall, or if she has undertaken a process of resurrection.

Violent incidents lie at the heart of Cornelia Parker's work. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997 on the strength of installations such as 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View', 1991, which involved the suspension of charred remnants of a garden shed that had been blown up, at her request, by the army. Unlike 'Cold Dark Matter', however, the bricks that make up 'Neither From Nor Towards' have been shaped over years, not seconds.

Neither From Nor Towards can be seen as part of Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s latest National Partnership Programme exhibition, Re[construct], until 25 June 2017.

Re[construct] questions our understanding of architecture, exploring ways in which artists have utilised materials in order to investigate and manipulate our experience of space. 

Brad Lochore’s paintings combine light and shade, illusion and reality, leaving us uncertain about what we are seeing. Shadow No.52, 1994, one of the largest canvases in the Arts Council Collection, has been made to the scale of a cinema screen reflecting Lochore’s interest in film technology.

The light grey tones of the grid-like shadows emerge from the stark white ground dazzling the viewer and creating a connection with the surrounding space as one is drawn to the source of the shadow.

However real they appear, the paintings are illusionary made by projecting digitally altered photographs onto the canvas; the ‘real’ shadow is made virtual and hence a new reality is created on the canvas. As Lochore describes: ‘I want to foreground the image as being a site of simultaneous seduction and betrayal for the viewer with the slightest and least meaningful images such as shadows and reflections as a pictorial source’.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Lochore moved to England when he was 17 years old. He began his career as a film set designer later studying art at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under renowned German visual artist, Gerhard Richter.

Shadow No.52 (pictured) can be seen in the Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme exhibition, Occasional Geometries: Rana Begum Curates the Arts Council Collection at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 15 July until 29 October.

Browse all works in the Collection by Brad Lochore

Rachel Maclean’s work comments on the consumerist values and habits of contemporary society.  Born in Edinburgh 1987, the Glasgow based artist-filmmaker features centre stage in her works, creating  different guises and fantastical settings with green screen technology.

Maclean’s films are a parody of fairy tales, children's programmes, YouTube videos and beauty advertisements taking the viewer into a candy-coated and hyper-saturated world with a caustic bite.

Feed Me, 2015, a film produced by the artist and Film and Video Umbrella, is a hypermodern parable of the seven deadly sins highlighting the pleasure and perils of indulgence. The film emphasises the commercialistion and sexulisation of infancy in modern culture and a corresponding infantilisation often displayed in adult behaviour.

Maclean often uses audio recordings which the characters lip synch creating collages of different materials from old Hollywood films. Maclean highlights the excesses of consumerism in the dystopian worlds she creates, with characters acting out modern day fairy tales, their identities inevitably collapse over the course of the narrative. She uses lurid, bright colours to discomfort and unsettle the viewer, to add humour and lighten the mood, but there is always a dark reality as an undercurrent to the work.

Feed Me can be seen at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as part of our National Partners Programme exhibition I Want! I Want!: Art & Technology, until 1 October 2017.

The National Partners Programme brings works from the Collection to four major galleries across the UK, find out more. 

In this month’s Artist Profile, Charlotte Keenan McDonald, Curator of British Art at Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, looks at the work of artist Anya Gallaccio.

Anya Gallaccio has often used organic materials, including, flowers, food and ice, to explore themes of decay, transience and loss in her artworks. One such piece is her sculpture, Can Love Remember the Question and the Answer? (2003), currently on show as part of Walker’s National Partners exhibition, Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender and Identity, until 5 November.

Made in 2003, the work comprises two mahogany doors which rest against a wall. Sixty fresh red gerbera flowers, with yellow centres, are placed between the door’s central windowpanes to complete the artwork. The flowers remain in place for the duration of the artworks display. Initially bright and luscious, the flowers inevitably fade and rot over time. Gallaccio makes a spectacle of their decay, reminding the viewer of how quickly beauty fades and how short life really is.

The title of sculpture is taken from a poem by W. H. Auden, To Ask the Hard Question is Simple, first published in 1930. The text is often interpreted in relation to the poet’s sexuality and its impossibility at a time when sexual relationships between men were still illegal. Gallaccio’s use of Auden’s poetry for the title of this work might be designed to remind us of the continuing struggle for equality for LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) people in society today.

Can Love Remember the Question and the Answer can currently be seen in Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender and Identity at the Walker Art Gallery. A National Partners Programme exhibition, bringing together nearly 100 artworks from the Arts Council Collection and the Walker’s own collection. The show explores how artists have addressed the show’s themes in their work since 1967 and is programmed to mark the 50^th anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), which partially decriminalised sex between most men aged over 21 in England and Wales.

Coming Out will subsequently tour to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, from 2 December until 15 April 2018.

 

In our latest Artist Profile, Curator Brian Cass, Head of Exhibitions at Towner Art Gallery, focuses on the work of Carol Rhodes.

Carol Rhodes is a Glasgow-based painter whose work often depicts oblique landscapes, detached views of non-places as if seen from a low-flying aircraft. Drawing on an eclectic range of aerial photographs and other sources, she combines fragments to create composite fictional topographies which are just distant enough to deny us insight into the land below.

Rhodes predominantly paints her landscapes on small boards rendered with great precision and restraint on gesso grounds in a distinctive palette of pale, washed-out pinks, muted clay colours, watery greys and lemon yellows.  Their aerial viewpoints have their roots in techniques of surveillance first developed through battlefield photography. But the paintings also evoke more ancient points of view: Renaissance townscapes, early Netherlandish pictures to Indian miniatures. But the distanced view, the unpopulated vacancy and the repressed colour creates a unique mysterious aura.

Industrial Landscape, 1997, is an exemplary work in which the uncanny and familiar fuse together to celebrate the skeletal anatomy of landscape. An industrial scene would normally be bustling with activity, yet in this view there are no people, cars, or movement. It is curiously stilled and deserted. The connected paths, the empty washed out green areas and the overlap of lines create a multi-layer landscape that is only finally intelligible and clear from the sky above. This painting is currently exhibited as a part of Towner Gallery’s National Partners exhibition At Altitude which looks at the historical impact and the continuing appeal of the aerial image.

At Altitude runs from 2 June until 30 September 2018 at Towner Art Gallery.

Brian Cass
Head of Exhibitions Towner

In our August Artist Profile blog, Katie Morton, Exhibitions Curator, Birmingham Museums, explores the work + and –  by Mona Hatoum.

Mona Hatoum’s work + and – is a multiple in which the conventional tools of mark-making and erasure are replaced by a motorised arm and a circular bed of sand. On one end of the arm is a toothed piece of metal and on the other is a smooth one. As the arm turns, it continuously makes marks in the sand and erases them. + and –  is currently being shown in The Everyday and Extraordinary at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition explores the potential of ordinary objects to be transformed and seen in new and insightful ways, and the transformation of familiar domestic objects is an important feature of Hatoum’s work.

Hatoum’s practice varies from works on paper to large-scale installations and her work explores the complexities, conflicts and contradictions of our world. Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents and became stranded in London when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. She has continued to live and work in London since. Her early practice was performance-based and highly political, touching on themes such as disenfranchisement, exile, separation and dislocation. From the late 1980s, Hatoum’s practice shifted to a focus on installations and sculptures. Many contain cage and grid-like structures which suggest containment and systems of control. Her sculptures regularly use domestic objects which have been transformed to evoke a sense of danger and the uncanny, often through changes to their structure or scale. They are simultaneously compelling and threatening, mesmerising and disturbing. Seen in this context, the continual mark-making and erasure in + and –evokes contrasting senses of creation and destruction, presence and disappearance, and presents these in a continuous cycle as the sand is grooved and smoothed down.

The Everyday and Extraordinary is a touring exhibition conceived by Birmingham Museums Trust as part of the Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme 2016-19. It is on show at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 9 September, then at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne from 28 September 2018 to 6 January 2019.

Artist Anne Hardy on the work of Collection artist Hubert Dalwood, whose work features in Towner Art Gallery’s latest National Partners exhibition, The Weather Garden: Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection.

Hubert Dalwood (1924-1976) often played with scale, making larger and smaller versions of the same work in order to view them differently. He imagined his sculptures as though they were ritualistic objects or artefacts from a forgotten civilization, leaving fingerprints or traces of his touch on clay models before casting them in metal. Arbor (1973) is an aluminium cast of a maquette that was created for a larger work, the modest scale of this sculpture sits like a stage, a miniature architectural space to project ourselves into.

In the context of The Weather Garden, Arbor becomes an indicator of the stage that we stand on in the exhibition– the floor of the gallery is reimagined as a breeze block plinth on which works and visitors come together. The shifting sense of scale contained within Arbor (as maquette or full size work) are also interesting in relation to Japanese Zen gardens, which were an influence on my approach to the exhibition–the garden as metaphor or stand-in for a larger world beyond, one that we may not be able to enter but only look at and meditate upon.

About The Weather Garden

Anne Hardy’s work derives from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather – using what she finds there to manifest sensory and unstable installation works that fully immerse you. Hardy brings this approach to her selection for The Weather Garden, envisioning the gallery space as a shifting impermanent landscape, a meditative environment shaped by local weather data, which has been translated into gently fluctuating light.

The Weather Garden is at Towner Art Gallery until 2 June 2019.

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Artist Anne Hardy on the work of Collection artist Margaret Organ, whose work features in Towner Art Gallery’s latest National Partners exhibition, The Weather Garden: Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection.

In the late 1970s, Margaret Organ (b. 1946) began to create a unique body of work by layering paper onto shaped wire, making expressive abstract works that occupied both walls and floor. Organ talks about seeking out a soft material that had sympathy with her ideas, unlike the more traditional hard materials that were more common in sculpture at the time, ‘With just one sheet of paper, there is so much potential, more than I ever discovered in anything else‘[1].

In photographs of these works their delicate forms seem to balance precariously in space; leaning against one another, resting against walls, and in corners, in ways that suggest they could collapse at any moment, Organ commented that, ‘I consider the strength of my work to be in its gentle quality. Gentleness in sculpture is invariably far stronger that the aggressive facade of work which has an overt strength’[2].

Organ has said that her works come about through ‘wanting to reach a particular set of relationships’[3] and has spoken about the strong emotional and physical relationship she has with her work, 'Everything seems to be dependent on me, and in the Loop piece it was very much about how wide my arms would stretch, and the height is always to do with my own field of vision, or just my size.’[4]