08/08/2015
Giles Ryder - HARDCORE STILL LIVES
H GALLERY CHIANG MAI
August 15 - September 27, 2015
Opening Party - Saturday 15 August 6 until 8
H Gallery is very pleased to announce installations by Giles Ryder across two of our spaces. These exhibitions are a result of an Asialink Arts Residency award from Australia which supported Ryder to produce works at Ne’Na Contemporary Artspace in Chiang Mai. This is H Gallery’s third collaboration with the Bangkok-based artist and we are delighted to welcome him back.
Ryder’s practice has a hard-edged quality that plays on the cultural significance of form and he works with a variety of media that includes lacquer, light, mirror and foam. The often reflective surfaces of his works suggest an advertising or consumerist sensibility but countered by a meditative minimal and geometric aesthetic. As dense presences within the gallery space, the works’ sense of objecthood can subtly draw our attention to the very experience of site and place.
For the installations at H Chiang Mai and H Project Space, Ryder has adapted readymade light structures from Cambodia, where they are found situated behind Buddha statues in a temple and cast mandala patterns. The artist is interested in the diverse significance of the technology as it suggests both religious worship and the hypnotic world of techno or disco music. A series of soft geometric paintings make a skewed reference to Mondrian and other giants of canonical art history. Here grids of primary colours are treated with metallic and fluorescent finishes and both create and dissolve pictorial space. For Ryder, it is the transgression of a ‘pure’ use of materials and form that allows for the emergence of new artistic languages.
Ryder’s installations and paintings offer perceptual shifts that cross the experience of materiality or formal qualities to bring us to culturally embedded meanings in off-kilter and always fascinating fashion.
Giles Ryder is based between Thailand and Australia. A graduate of Griffith University in Brisbane, he also undertook Postgraduate studies at Sydney College of Art and Kunsthochschule Berlin, with funding from Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Ryder is a recipient of the ARTAND Australia/Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and was an Asian Pacific Artist Fellow at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2011. Selected solo exhibitions include Black Magic (2012), Blockprojects, Melbourne; Artereal Gallery (2011), Sydney; The New Nouveaux Nullism (2010), Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane; Life without Rituals (2010), Blockprojects, Melbourne; and Vectorize (2009), Raum Weiss, Berlin. Selected group exhibitions include Be Abstract (2014), Kunstverein Schwabisch Hall & Ballhaus Ost, Berlin; Less is More (2012), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Conflicts of Interest II (2012), H Gallery, Bangkok; and the Korean International Art Fair (2011). Public collections include Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Artbank, Sydney; and Griffith Artworks, Brisbane. Ryder’s works are included in private collections in Austria, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Munich, Leiden, Netherlands, Edinburgh, London, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. He teaches at Bangkok University International and has also taught at Sydney College of Art/The University of Sydney and King Mongkut’s University of Technology Ladkrabaeng in Thailand.
