The real killer of art, Ryan Gander suggests, is procrastination. His solution is always to act on ideas “before they lose their energy”. His studio, in a former register office and sports hall in the Suffolk village of Melton, is living proof of that determination. Before we sit and talk, he gives me a tour.
In one room are the moon paintings he is making for an exhibition in Tokyo, some using paint prints from upturned tables in a Chinese restaurant; in another are some of his draped mirror series in which the reflection-obscuring fabric is cast in marble; here are piles of art posters for exhibitions that never happened, there are animatronic “dying mosquitoes” twitching on gold playing cards; in one corner is a vending machine trading an alphabetic list of “everything you never want to run out of” – A is After Eights, B is Beer, # is a bag of marijuana; there are recreations of graffitied back alley doorways, recast in polished steel; plans for the most authentic lifesize gorilla robot ever made, with “smells, sounds, everything”, which should be ready for his exhibition at Lisson Gallery later this year; homages to 1970s slideshows; a recreated transparent Japanese gym locker…
