Ryan Gander calls painting 'futile and dumb' — then hangs paintings at Towner

Ryan Gander, 50, opens a new show this month at Eastbourne's Towner gallery titled Maybe: Ryan Gander — and the conceptual artist has used the occasion to call drawing and painting "futile and dumb". He told the interviewer: "Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It's such a weird act. Why would I draw you when I could just take a photograph?"

The contradiction is deliberate. The exhibition features new paintings, Gander's first, made in collaboration with his seven-year-old son Baxter, who is autistic and non-verbal. The works emerged from play with Picture Exchange Communication System cards used to help non-verbal children communicate. Baxter fixated on a card showing a beachball; Gander painted a huge beachball in response. The show also includes sculptures of Gander's two daughters, aged 12 and 17, and musical compositions Baxter created by placing stickers on a stave, playable via a wind-up music box mounted on the gallery wall.

What does Gander say about his son?

Gander claims his son is, in effect, telepathic. "I know that sounds a bit hocus-pocus, but he's hypersensitive in ways that we would never be," he said. The beachball painting, he explained, "was almost taking the piss out of the way humans try to rationalise everything that's different. There's nothing wrong with Baxter. The only thing that's wrong with Baxter is society because he doesn't function in it. It's the same with me being in a wheelchair. There's nothing wrong with me. The problem is the fucking nightclub's down a flight of steps."

The collaborations double as Gander's argument against abstract art mystique. "There's no such thing as a good or bad abstract painting," he said. "The angels don't sing and there's no divine intervention. There's no Jackson Pollock's genius."

Why does he attack the YBAs?

Gander describes himself as part of a lost generation that emerged after the Young British Artists. "It was very hard to be a British artist after such an egocentric, attention-seeking, shallow kind of art," he said. "It was loved by people in Britain but you'd go across to Benelux or to France and everyone would be like, 'Zis eez stupid!' They thought we were total idiots because it was just debauchery and narcissism and egocentric shouting."

He visited Tate's recent survey of the 1990s and judged that decade's work superior to today's — "at least everything looked different". Current painting, he says, has collapsed into repetition: "Frog paintings. Paintings of frogs on bikes. Just nonsense that doesn't mean anything."

Why has Britain never embraced him?

Gander has never been nominated for the Turner Prize, despite major shows and larger prizes abroad, including strong followings in Japan and the US. "I've done bigger things in bigger museums and I've won bigger prizes than the Turner," he said. His prescription: "If you're going to do a show you need to do it like you're going to die next week."

Galleries once warned that his style-hopping would kill his career. He ignored them, and in 30 years, he says, he has "never not sold work".

How does he work?

Gander conceives ideas alone in a small Barbican studio — "Only I have the key to that" — and executes them in a larger Suffolk studio, with roughly 100 pieces in progress at any time. His raw material is a card index of around 22,000 cryptic prompts ("Snow machine creating drift within floor"; "Glow-in-the-dark props") that serve as creative catalysts, less prescriptive than Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. Past projects include cocktail recipes, treasure hunts, carved wooden condoms and chess sets built from car components.

He is now slowing down after a recent divorce. "I can't do everything," he said. Even the new paintings get no special pleading: "I've never shown these paintings before. I don't even know if I like them as art." Then, grinning: "Well, you can't just show bangers all the time, can you?"