Ryan Gander

A newly commissioned artwork by celebrated artist Ryan Gander OBE RA, Ms Modern Classical Conceptualist, or Their Shadows Obscured (Dramaturgical framework for structure and stability) (2025), is now on display in the Living Area. Following its radical relaunch in 2023, the Sainsbury Centre became the first museum in the world to formally recognise the living lifeforce of art, enabling people to build relationships with living art across its dynamic museum landscape. Gander’s installation invites us to think about what makes us human; how we position ourselves in the world, and in turn, how we see and study others.

Ryan Gander works across sculpture, film, installation, and performance; and his work is often reminiscent of a puzzle, a network with multiple connections, the fragments of a story, or a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered. This new work explores the artist’s reflections on qualities like empathy and humility in which, in his own words, he contrasts strength and power as opposing states. These tensions are central to the generic, and nonspecific form of Gander’s work – which is itself extremely politicised, though “without political motivation” – commenting on the nature of power, without that power being for any given position.

The armature person becomes a finely adjustable milieu which invites the viewer’s projections, and reflects their strengths, and weaknesses, as well as morality, humility and empathy.     Image: A young visitor enjoying Ryan Gander, Ms Modern Classical Conceptualist, or Their Shadows Obscured (Dramaturgical framework for structure and stability), 2025. Photo by Kate Wolstenholme.     Stay up to date… click here to subscribe to our newsletter to find out about upcoming exhibitions, events, new content on our Channel and more.