Ryan Gander, When I take a hint, I take it pretty hard at Emily Cooper Gallery, London

When I take a hint, I take it pretty hard by Ryan Gander, at Emily Cooper Gallery, London, 07/10/2025–19/10/2025.

“Do our dreams keep secrets from us, even when we’re the ones who dream them?” As we crossed the gallery’s threshold, this question hummed like static in our ears. Ryan Gander’s When I take a hint, I take it pretty hard doesn’t just beckon viewers into a show, it lets them trespass through the corridors of sleepless imaginings, where ambition is restless and memory speculative. The exhibition unfolds not with bold gestures but quiet duplicity: a sculptural archive of forty-nine veiled dreams, masked beneath a single revealed face.

The Emily Cooper Gallery, in its inaugural show, embraces intimacy and intent. The atmosphere is hushed, as if the walls themselves are unsure whether to whisper or stay silent. Visitors meander slowly, drawn into proximity by the lone poster visible, the rest concealed beneath like sedimentary strata of Gander’s mind. The lighting is soft and deliberate, spotlighting this single piece, letting the rest remain a mystery just beyond reach.

Each work in Phantom Ambition is a speculative fiction, a poster designed with institutional precision, imagining exhibitions that never were, but perhaps could be. Venues are both real and invented, dates stretch forwards and backwards. Some posters commemorate ghost events in the past, others hint at futures yet to materialize. The typography, layout, and curatorial tone mimic the specific aesthetics of each supposed institution. This series, initially presented in Spain, finds its British echo here, grounded yet disoriented.

Materially, the gesture is simple but densely layered. Paper, ink, and the language of art administration become the artist’s palette. Conceptually, it is a hall of mirrors: each poster a simulation of a possibility, each layer a repressed desire. Gander’s method, drafting these dream-exhibitions to soothe insomnia, functions as both release and obsession. The Tetris Effect, that hypnagogic afterimage of persistent thought, is not just referenced, it is lived here.

And yet, there is something deeply tender in this architecture of fiction. The revealed poster is both portal and decoy. The other forty-nine, lying dormant beneath, hold the weight of unspoken ambitions. The gesture is modest but profoundly human, who among us hasn’t constructed entire futures in the liminal space between rest and wakefulness?

As we left, it wasn’t the single poster that stayed with us, but the thickness of the stack below it. A silence with weight. A dream pressed gently under glass.