Biography
Ryan Board is a British‑Maltese artist and experiential designer whose career spans more than three decades at the intersection of fine art, design, and cultural production. Trained in Fine Art Painting at Central Saint Martins, he later shaped large‑scale installations, exhibitions, and spatial interventions for leading artists, blue‑chip institutions, and global brands, including the Serpentine Galleries, the Design Museum, Yoko Ono, and Hermès. Working internationally, with studios and projects across Berlin, Barcelona, Bilbao, Malta, and now Switzerland, his approach fuses the technical precision of a producer with the perpetual curiosity of an experimenter.
Ryan’s early career wove together deep studio experimentation and cutting‑edge design. He was awarded the prestigious Mercury Art Prize for his work Uncut, marking a formative shift into experimental practice. Establishing studio space in a disused piano factory in Shoreditch, he explored interiors, lighting, furniture, and other spatial concepts, frequently in the press such as Elle Decoration, before moving into a period of stage, set, and event design. During this era, he merged engineering, design, and production skills to realise major commissions for institutions such as the ICA, Tate Modern, V&A, and Hayward Gallery. This was a time when installation art was gaining traction, and Ryan’s hybrid expertise became instrumental to cultural programs and exhibitions.
As his career expanded, so did his geography and ambition. Ryan established studios across Europe, notably in Berlin and Barcelona. He founded Exhibition Continues in South London, a major studio employing dozens of artists and fabricators to develop bespoke projects for the world’s leading museums and galleries. Collaborations with artists such as John Bock, Yoko Ono, and Haim Steinbach ran parallel to an ever‑growing stream of commissions from blue‑chip brands, conjuring concepts for global product launches and press events for companies including Nokia, Microsoft, and Lenovo. Simultaneously, he accepted lecturing posts at University of the Arts London and Krabbesholm Højskole in Denmark, while nurturing an intimate, experimental studio practice abroad.
In time, forging work at the borderlands of art world and industry took its toll, prompting a decisive return to the substance of his formal training as an artist, and where he has now established his base near Basel, Switzerland.
Ryan’s current focus is the consolidation of decades of experimentation, invention, and projects into BoARD, the Bureau of Abundance Research & Design, a living archive and engine for his research‑driven practice. The work emerging from BoARD is both deeply personal and fundamentally collaborative, comprising his artistic research interventions, experiential installations, and conceptual instruments, projects traversing Europe and probing cultural, ecological, and ontological systems. These projects straddle the poetic and the practical, seeking profound transformation and revelation over spectacle, where art becomes a proposition for how to see, connect, and adapt in an unsettled world.
Diagnosed as autistic later in life, Ryan credits sensory perception, pattern‑seeking, and a resistance to convention as foundational to his unique approach to spatial and experiential practice. His vision is that raw, unadulterated creativity is the only methodology agile enough to make meaning of the contemporary complexity we experience. The projects he makes and the way he makes them are as much about interrogating what art can do as a process, as who or what an artist must be.
Across every project, Ryan is singularly engaged in the intimate development of spatial environments, engineering, ideating, and directing from concept to completion with some of the world’s most influential artists, brands, and cultural institutions. This ongoing inadvertent journey is as much about shaping experiences as being transformed by them, a creative life spent dancing between engineering, artistic vision, and the cultivation of profound human experience.