The Die is Cast

The die is cast is the British artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in France and the first overview of the artist’s work to date. A selection of more than fifty works from the last ten years will be shown alongside new works produced during a three month residency at Villa Arson. These works are inspired by the specificity of the place, and are testimonies to his sometimes unexpected meetings with the students of the art school. Ryan Gander describes his practice as answering the intention to create something totally disconcerting. His work is like a vast puzzle to which each new piece adds an element. Installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, texts or sound pieces create a body of work that questions both the conditions of creation, and the mechanisms of perception and apprehension of a work of art. Most of his works play wih displacing common objects, situations or systems in which he instils an often enigmatic narrative, following the notion of loose associations. He navigates between autobiography and fiction, truth and falsehood, the visible and the invisible. Surprisingly each piece functions as an incipit. The rest of the story is left to be invented, as if the artist wanted to stimulate our imagination by revealing only parts of it. His ambition is to summon the desire and responsibility of the viewer by offering the possibility to compose a narrative continuity based on traces and ill-assorted elements.