Ryan Gander Lost in the complexity of a language of my own making (Rouge Belge), 2017

During a visit to a stonemason’s workshop in Belgium Ryan Gander noticed the wooden board on which marble was cut to size. The surface is crisscrossed by vertical and horizontal saw marks of different depth and width, creating a grid of grooves. Bearing the traces of past actions, the wood is a record of the stonemason’s craft. In a self-referential nod to the board’s function, its frame is made from marble.

At the same time, the grid—produced by chance through an arbitrary sequence of operations—could be considered to represent central ideas of modernist abstraction. The history of abstraction is a recurring motif in Ryan Gander’s work.