New Works by Ryan Gander in New York
From the utopian ambitions of the modernist movement to the overlooked details of daily experience, Ryan Gander’s work ranges across a dizzying spectrum of forms and ideas. His meticulously researched projects—which have included such diverse conceptual gestures as an invented word, a chess set, a television script, and a children’s book—engage familiar historical narratives and cultural paradigms only to unravel their structures and assumptions, presenting elusive scenarios that abound with interpretive potential. This fall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim and the Public Art Fund present the following new projects by Gander. RYAN GANDER: THE HAPPY PRINCE
Presented by Public Art Fund
September 15, 2010 – April 10, 2011
Ryan Gander’s The Happy Prince, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s beloved children’s story, transforms the climactic final scene of the fallen statue into a lyrical work of art, reminiscent of a romantic ruin. Using a sophisticated casting process with glass-reinforced concrete, the artist depicts the scene of the fallen statue at life size; the Prince’s heart, sword, and helmet, as well as the body of the dead swallow, lay amidst the debris, the column the Prince once stood upon protruding upward through the rubble. However, unlike the fragments of an actual ruin, Gander’s work is one single, massive form. His work is not a literal illustration of Wilde’s story so much as a representation of the ruin as an idea. Sited in a densely populated public plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park, the sculpture resonates with the surrounding civic monuments; it also invites comparisons between the inequalities of wealth in the gilded age of Wilde’s fictional city and modern-day New York. The Happy Prince is Ryan Gander’s first public art commission in the United States. The artist will also launch the fall 2010 Public Art Fund Talks series with one of his celebrated Loose Associations presentations on Thursday, September 16 at 6:30 pm at The New School’s John Tishman Auditorium. To purchase tickets, visit publicartfund.org or call 212 223 7805.
Major support provided by the Kraus Family Foundation. Additional support from Lisson Gallery, and from James Keith Brown & Eric G. Diefenbach.
Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park
60th Street and 5th Ave
New York City
publicartfund.org
INTERVALS: RYAN GANDER AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011
As part of the Guggenheim’s Intervals series, Ryan Gander has created a new, site-specific installation in the Aye Simon Reading Room, a small library and study space located on Rotunda Level 2. Here visitors encounter a scene of apparent catastrophe that relates to Gander’s ongoing exploration of the schism between the Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. These friends and creative collaborators severed their relationship in 1924 due to Van Doesburg’s belief in the diagonal line as a valid element in abstract art, which conflicted with Mondrian’s insistence on a reductive visual language consisting of only gridded horizontals and verticals. Gander imagines this artistic dogmatism provoking a violent struggle between the two men that sends them crashing through a stained-glass window in the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Guggenheim Museum. In a mysterious temporal and spatial discontinuity, the debris from this accident has landed in the reading room, showering fragments of glass and lead over the books about Wright’s life and work that are customarily available in the space. Accompanying this relic from the annals of art history is an artifact that has been transported to the museum from the future: a “quarter centi-dollar” representing the inflated worth of a contemporary quarter to 25 dollars by the year 2032, that has been glued to the floor in reference to a classic practical joke.
The leadership committees for the Intervals series and Intervals: Ryan Gander are gratefully acknowledged.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York City
Sunday–Wednesday: 10 am–5:45 pm
Friday: 10 am–5:45 pm
Saturday: 10 am–7:45 pm
guggenheim.org
