At the show with the artist: Ryan Gander dispatches an art forger to Rembrandt’s Anatomy lesson
Whoever is familiar with Ryan Gander’s art practice knows about the artist’s allusive artistic language and his passion for opened relations between objects and for storytellings. Therefore, the viewer would find his current solo show at gb agency in Paris absolutely coherent with the unique poetic Gander has patiently shaped during these years of info-based art production.
Also in this instance, each single element on display is at the same time autobiographical and exemplary of the way artists tend to regard reality as a sort of semiotic jungle. Gander’s trainers cast and invested in bronze, for example, are titled “Your romanticism”, therefore addressing to someone in his personal sphere – possibly his wife Oliva –, or the viewer himself, whose romanticism is in effect required to approach the exhibition. Similarly, the two dimensional association between an “Obscene” stereo and the first person writing, which describes the former as a conceptual object, could be read either by taking into account Ryan Gander’s personal experience and interests, or by considering Gander himself a paradigmatic artist who ironically deals with Marcel Duchamp’s evergreen idea of ready made.
Bearing this in mind we have looked at “Your cognitive dissonance” (2014), the only other piece on show with “Yours” in the titles, and indeed the one that evidently interests us the most. In this case Gander asked to an art forger to paint a life-sized reproduction of the bottom left hand corner of Rembrandt’s “The anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp”. « I chose the piece – Gander told us – because I saw it in a book in the library in my home town. I’ve seen the reproduction many times. It always struck me how dark the corner was and the inability to make out any detail there, which for me was more intriguing than the rest of the painting. The inability to see gives an active mind the ability to imagine. I’ve never seen the original in the flesh, although I did pay the ticket for an art forger to go to see it, in order to make the copy of the corner you see in the show at gb agency ».
It follows that, on the one side, the meaning of Gander’s piece lies in the actual experience of having an art forger go to the recently renovated Mauritshuis Gallery in Den Haag, Netherlands, for making a copy of one of the milestones of the art history, visited every year by thousands of people. On the other side there is the contemporary artist, who looks at a masterpiece and deals with its extraordinary power. But while the autobiographical experience is pretty easy to imagine, the artist’s interest for a marginal detail is a complicated dark matter into which even a master such as Rembrandt would get lost.
November 21, 2022
