‘T his is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “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?”

Gander has many such opinions, from how we measure the value of work to why 90s Brit art was a load of nonsense (more on that later). He also has a superb way of communicating that makes whatever he says seem like the most obvious thing in the world. After an entertaining couple of hours in his company, I leave thinking: “It’s not Gander who’s mad – it’s everyone else.”

Adding confusion to his anti-painting stance is the fact that his new show, Maybe: Ryan Gander, at Eastbourne’s Towner gallery, features new works that are – wait for it – paintings.…