Reader in Fine Art; Research Convener


Room: Mel 015

Email: david.ryan@anglia.ac.uk

Telephone: 0845 196 2472
International: +44 1223 363271 ext 2472


Personal Website: www.david-ryan.co.uk


David Ryan's research activity pages

David Ryan is a visual artist and writer based in Cambridge and London, who is also actively involved in contemporary music. He studied at Liverpool and Coventry Polytechnics, and also on a travelling German Scholarship to Hamburg, Lubeck and Berlin. His extensive writing on art and music includes pieces on Jessica Stockholder, Bernard Frize, John Riddy, Shirley Kaneda, Fabian Marcaccio, Franz Ackermann, David Reed, Katherina Grosse, Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Helmut Lachenmann and Jonathan Lasker for various art publications including Modern Painters, Dissonanz in Switzerland, Leonardo Music Journal, San Francisco, Art Papers USA, Contemporary Visual Arts, Contemporary, London, Artpress, Paris, and Tempo, and Art Monthly, London. Catalogue contributions include Hybrids for Tate Liverpool, and Jessica Stockholder/Fabian Marcaccio for Sammlung Goetz, Munich. He has given lectures on abstract painting including venues such as the UNAM (National University of Mexico), Mexico, Warwick Arts Centre, Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt, Germany, Dahl Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland, and Tate Liverpool, UK. His publication Talking Painting: Dialogues with 12 Contemporary Abstract Painters (2002) is published by Routledge, and a contribution ('Experimental Music and the Visual Arts') is included in the Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Ashgate Academic Press 2009) as well as a chapter in Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff (Ashgate Academic Press 2010). He has lectured at Christies, Sothebys and Chelsea College of Art and Design, and is currently Reader in Fine Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, as well as a founding member of their Fine Art Research Unit. David received his PhD by publication from Anglia Ruskin University in 2010 entitled Indeterminate Relations: The Open Work in Contemporary Visual Art and Music.

He has exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery (Open Exhibition), London, British Abstract Painters, Flowers West, Los Angeles, USA; Painting and Time at the Nunnery Gallery, London, British Abstract Painting 2001 at Flowers East, London, Surface Connections, Holden Gallery Manchester, Illuminate at Jasmine Studios, Hammersmith, London, Flux at London Bridge Tunnels, On the Way to Things at Churchill College, Cambridge, Transfer at Keith Talent gallery, London, Meta- in Cambridge and London, and Crossing Abstraction at the Kunstraum Bethianen, Berlin (2009).

As a performer David has also been active within the field of contemporary music and performed for Danish Radio; Huddersfield International Contemporary Music Festival; New Music Marathon, Northwestern University, Chicago; The Barbican Art Centre, London (Cage Uncaged, 2004), Line-Point-Line, Los Angeles, and is Director of Dal Niente Projects which presents neglected modernist and contemporary experimental works in London. He has also collaborated with Italian composer Nicola Sani on Non tutte ie Isole... an 'opera' for three instrumentalists and sound projection in October 2003, presenting a three-part video projection. Other collaborations with Sani include AchaB 3 at the 2006 Synthese Festival, Bourges France (a 3 screen video). He has also composed Prelude/Postlude 2, part of Sonic Illuminations presented at the BFI, London in 2008. David has had numerous awards including Arts Council of England, Jazz Services, Britten-Pears; Holst and Hinrichsen Foundations; Sonora, Rome, as well as Italian and American Government grants. He participated in this year's Cut and Splice Festival devoted to Stockhausen, which was broadcast on Radio 3 and he was also presented at the 2008 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with a video collaboration with Nicola Sani. He recently completed a film on new music at Darmstadt: Knots and Fields (2010) with director Andrew Chesher, which was shown in Cambridge and in Germany at the International Ferienkurse der Neue Musik in Darmstadt itself (2010). He has also recently been awarded an Art Council England award for a film exploring a unique location in Rome: the house of the Italian composer Scelsi, now completed and entitled Via di San Teodoro 8 it is currently touring venues in the UK and abroad in 2010/11.

For more information and samples of David's work please see his research activity pages or the Fine Art Research Unit website.

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