Biography
Jo Ganter RSA (b. Yorkshire, UK 1963) 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 teaches at Edinburgh College of Art and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2004.
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. Her work has been acquired by a number of prestigious collections, including, The Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp, The Ashmolean in Oxford, and New York Public Library.
"Photography is often perceived to be an invisible medium that allows the spectator immediate and uninterrupted access to the subject. That subject equally, is understood to be a part of the world, made by nature rather than by the artist. I hijack this process, first by making the subject to be photographed and then by making the mediation of the photograph apparent. I translate photographic images into photo-etchings that have a greater material presence than a normal photograph. I juxtapose digitally printed photographs with roughly etched areas of coloured aquatint. The subjects, made and photographed, are visual metaphors for the human form and condition"
