Born in Yorkshire in 1963, Jo Ganter RSA has been based in Glasgow since the early 1990s having moved to Scotland to study at Edinburgh College of Art in 1983. After graduating in 1988 she was awarded the RSA John Kinross Scholarship and an Andrew Grant Scholarship. These bursaries allowed Ganter to travel in Tuscany. Italy was an important influence on her work and she was successful in gaining a Rome Scholarship in 1989, enabling her to study at the British School at Rome.
Ganter works with traditional and new media to produce 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.
Ganter's work is held by prestigious collections including the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Contemporary Art Society, London; and New York Public Library.
She is a Lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and was elected a Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2004. In 2019, Silent Music | Seeing Sound, a collaborative exhibition between Ganter and composer Raymond MacDonald, was held at the Royal Scottish Academy.