The title taken from reading that book

Installation view

Ryan Gander was born in Chester (UK) in 1976, he lives and works in Amsterdam and London. In 2005 he had been awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 36 for his work “Is this guilt in you too”? – ( a car in a field). Gander's oeuvre, which encompasses a multitude of forms, is distinguished by conceptual rigorousness and a visual simplicity. His ambition is to provoke the human desire for narratives by dropping enigmatic traces of authentic and fictional stories. The enormous discursive capacity calls for a balancing act between different kinds of association and offers the audience the opportunity to create a narrative continuity on their own. Gander says: "There are so many answers to any one question that it simply wouldn't be interesting to narrow a reading down by suggesting a definitive conclusion" and: "my practice is actually very catalytic in terms of providing answers, just not my answers. After all that's not my job, it's the spectators'."

George Henry Longly, I do not know why it is amusing to make a marble run down a long intricate path, and dollop down steps, and come almost but not quite to a stop, and rush out of dark places and across little bridges of card: it is and we do, 2006, Cuisenaire rods

Installation view

George Henry Longly, To know what it is to make a spiky shape may help to model a spiky dragon, 2006, Ink on paper, 42 x 29.7cm

George Henry Longly, born in England in 1978, studied at the Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield and at the Central Saint Martins College of Art an Design in London. In 2004 he was honoured with the AHRB Postgraduate Funding. He lives and works in London. Longly's highly aesthetic art is informed by the contemplative effects of the American minimalist sculpture of the sixties, but goes, as he declares, "beyond just this into a debate of other themes such as subjectivity and objectivity, aesthetics and how to deal with the problem of project-based artwork." In terms of investigating the transference of information that occurs between different objects and viewer, he puts together several pieces of art, which contrast with and complement one another at the same time and form a non-verbal dialogue, that can – and should - be paradoxical or even polemical.

The associative affluence that unfolds itself through a calculated ambiguity is the common ground of the two artists presented. By hiding and revealing information, the pieces on exhibition leave the viewer exposed to an exciting and very stimulating uncertainty.

Denise Frey

George Henry Longly, An equation for the expansion of smoke, 2006, cuisenaire rods, 64 x 54cm