Ryan Gander Painting drawing, 2024

Ryan Gander's work places a used cloth napkin in a frame, behind glass. The napkins in the series, titled Painting drawing, are from real-life events the artist attended, attested by the precise captions which designate the items on the menu that left the stains. Affixed to burlap or coarse unprimed linen, each napkin features a delicate drawing of a painting on an easel. The work plays on the doubling of a drawing of a painting, framed on canvas, the traditional support of paintings. With this series Gander, whose practice does not include any painting as such, addresses preconceived notions of artistic production which is still largely associated with this medium.

Napkins from dinners he attended are also a subject of Gander's earlier series I’ve enabled every rule, for which the artist had linen dinner napkins cast in Carrara marble and placed upon modernist wooden plinths.