Heralded as the New Black

Thanks Jesse Birch for this one:

Click on the image for an interview with English artist Ryan Gander, on the occasion of his first show since taking the past year off. It’s an interesting example of the artist’s response to quick success, which often has the tendency to cause artists to oversaturate the marketplace, lose favour with fickle audiences, and simply burn out. In Gander’s case, the artist chose to put off exhibiting in order to participate in parallel artistic pursuits such as writing art criticism and curating.

The interview isn’t about that, however, it’s about the work he’s showing. Having yet to see any of Gander’s work in person, it’s nice to get a glimpse not only of the pieces, but of their spatial dimension within the gallery. The artist neatly articulates their relationship with the institution—which works are specific to the gallery, and which are more generally institutional in nature, such as the jumpsuits he designed for the docents and the wall texts, which are anything but didactic. It’s a real pity this show comes down a week before I arrive in London, but hopefully with his sabbatical at an end I’ll have the opportunity to visit some of his work in person quite soon.

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