Ryan Gander and Olive May Gander: Jolly Grown Up

Quartz Studio presents the exhibition Jolly Grown Up, a project by the English artist Ryan Gander (b. 1976, Chester), conceived in every detail with his five-year-old daughter Olive May Gander. The starting point of this exchange between equals, between father and daughter, was The redistribution of everything that is good from 2014.

As Ryan Gander explains, “A year ago I gave my daughter, who was four at the time, a small Moleskine notebook with the idea that she would take pride in the drawings she made (instead of having hundreds of half-finished sheets of A4 strewn around the floor) and learn how documents and objects work together in collections—in this instance, bound into a volume. To my surprise, she came back to me an hour later with the same book complete. She had not made a single mark in the book, but instead had torn, folded, cut, and punched holes and shapes in the pages. She had double bluffed, the creative freedom her childhood naivety had given her had producing an unexpected masterpiece. She had a totally altered perspective on the notion of artmaking, markmaking and bookmaking, and in that ‘not knowing,’ something entirely original had been brought into the world. The artwork The redistribution of everything that is good is a revisiting of that moment. That book that had been made by my daughter was scanned page by page and meticulously laid out so that the spectator can see the book as an overview or a whole in once glance, to produce aluminum printing plates.” With the exception of The redistribution of everything that is good, all the works in the show were conceived and created by Ryan and Olive specifically for Jolly Grown Up.

The installation In Real Life? opens (and closes) the exhibition, with 175 printed copies of a shoebox hand-painted by Olive.