Born in Yorkshire in 1963, Jo Ganter has been based in Glasgow since the early 1990s having moved to Scotland to study at Edinburgh College of Art in 1983. After graduating from the Fine Art MA in 1988 she was awarded the John Kinross Scholarship and an Andrew Grant Scholarship. These bursaries allowed Ganter to travel in Tuscany for three months before continuing her studies at the college for a year as a postgraduate. Italy was an important influence on her work and she was successful in gaining a Rome Scholarship in 1989, that enabled her to spend nine months as a scholar at The British School at Rome.
Ganter works with traditional and new media to produce original limited edition etchings, relief prints, and animations. Her images move from abstract pieces that suggest a sense of real space and light, through a kind of ambiguous representation to pure abstraction. While each suite of images is very different, the artist always works in series and consistently references grids and planes of colour or tone that move parallel to the picture surface creating a shallow depth.
Since 2014, she has worked with musicians to create graphic scores, (images which direct improvised music replacing the traditional music score). These are her most abstract and colourful pieces and lead directly to the work showing at the Tatha Gallery.
Jo Ganter’s work has been acquired by a number of prestigious collections, including, The Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp, The Ashmolean in Oxford, Contemporary Art Society London, and New York Public Library. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 2000, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2003 & 2015), Hart Gallery, London (2000, 2003, 2006), Kleinert James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, 2017, Silent Music Seeing Sound at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh in 2019, part of the group show Drink in the Beauty at GoMA, Glasgow 2021, Jane Street Art Center, Saugerties, NY, 2022.
Ganter teaches at Edinburgh College of Art and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2004
Circling the Square, attempting to do the impossible, is a good summation of artistic endeavour. We try to express something intangible, personal but for everyone. Something unsayable. Abstract visual art shares this quality especially with music; abstract statements difficult to express in text or words.
The work here has been made over the last five years and is influenced by my work with musicians to create graphic scores, (visual images that direct improvised music). I have always used grids, and these are still apparent in the formal composition of the work but circles, ellipses, and semi-circles, take centre stage. Squares appear only as the negative of the circles cut from them. These are playful, abstract pieces which allow me to use bold colour combinations and create movement across the paper. Printed from birch plywood, the grain of the wood intercedes as shapes and colours overlap multiple times.
Some prints are carefully composed, Nodding to Cornelius, (a nod to the avant-garde musician and composer, Cornelius Cardew), and Untitled, (Three Ellipses), but then I take the blocks and improvise as I print them in new colours and combinations. In this way, I reflect the musicians I work with and respond to, both composing and improvising at different moments, inking the blocks by hand and printing them multiple times as I react to each new layer of colour as it appears.
During lockdown, I was unable to complete Untitled (Three Ellipses) but animated the image instead to music played by my partner, George Burt, and mastered by me. It expresses much of what I hope is in the prints themselves.
Jo Ganter