“We ask the wrong questions about art when we try to judge it,” the artist Ryan Gander tells me outside the main galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts one summer afternoon; his particular bugbear, he says, is the word “like”. “We use ‘like’ as if that means something. Whether you like it doesn’t mean it’s a good artwork or not. I love Chinese food, but I’m not into pizza. That doesn’t mean pizza’s shit. It just means I don’t like it. But we talk about liking as if it’s good or bad.”
Gander only became a member of the Royal Academy (RA) in 2021, and he cuts an unusual figure in such a hoary institution. Born in Chester in 1976, he studied at Manchester Metropolitan University in the late 1990s. Since then, he has developed a practice that is hard to categorise—he is ambivalent about being described as a “conceptual” artist—but underpinning much of his work is an ability to fix constellations of ideas into simple, even disarming forms. The idea, usually, is to draw us in so that we might be more receptive to what he has to say.
Gander himself can be disarming, too, especially for an artist: he speaks softly and without a hint of pretension. Never seen without either a cap or beanie—and seldom any colour other than black—on the day we meet he’s wearing a cap with the word “Sunset” written on it.
Gander tells me that he makes a keen distinction between “art for the eyes” and “art for the brain”. “We’re all obsessed with stuff,” he says, “when, actually, we should be obsessed with ephemeral things like memories, stories, relationships.” He asks us to consider: to what extent does the art exist beyond itself? How many people are talking about it, keeping it alive right now? If “bad” art sticks in your head long after the fact, can it actually be considered bad?
Gander adds that he has a lot of art in his own home that he actively doesn’t like—he owns them for other reasons, their historical significance or for their impact on our culture. On the face of it, this might sound a little weird—“I’ve also got works I really like,” he clarifies—but, as praxis, it has served him extremely well in his recent role as coordinator of the RA’s annual summer exhibition, which this year brings together more than 1,800 pieces, a new record in the show’s 258-year history.
Overseeing a thing like the summer exhibition, with its open call to the general public, comes with especial poignancy for Gander. “I have my experience of applying to things like this,” he says. “I never got in. I applied to so many competitions when I was younger, and art schools. I applied to Goldsmiths, St Martin’s, Chelsea, the Royal College, all of them. Never got in, never even got an interview at any of them. Now they ask me to teach there,” he adds, with a grin.
Gander says he largely left it to the other academicians to choose works for the show, using his role instead to set the overall tone and direction. His chosen theme for this year is “interconnectedness”.
The exhibition space itself is largely unobtrusive—no brash pink walls, like Grayson Perry’s 250th version—except for a pale line running through every room at a height of two metres. In this line Gander has freighted a mix of historical, psychological and artistic ideas; for one, it is higher than a gentleman’s top hat, meaning artworks displayed above it were considered more prestigious in times of yore, being visible over the bustling crowd. (But not too high; “skying”, in which works are hung deliberately so far up they’re hard to see, is an old mark of disrespect at the RA.)
He hopes that what makes his display unique is an emphasis on the avant garde: “I think a lot of art now is made to be pleasing, to make you feel comfortable. I understand that, because the world’s scary as fuck.” But an exhibition, he says, should be a place where “the artworks ask you something that makes you feel uncomfortable and challenges you. Being challenged, rather than pleased, is what’s important.”
Gander’s vision is compelling, but inevitably with this massively popular yet surprisingly contentious show in the British art calendar, some people are going to like his exhibition while some will decisively not. But—as Gander himself so helpfully reminds us—the real question is: was that ever the point?
The 2026 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is open until Sunday, 23 August 2026
