Rodney Graham, an artist whose dryly funny works about repetition made him one among Canada’s most celebrated artists, died at 73 on Saturday in Vancouver.
In an announcement of his death, his 4 galleries—303 Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, and Esther Schipper—said he had been battling cancer for the past 12 months.
Because the ’90s, Graham has been widely celebrated within the international art world for movies, photographs, paintings, and more that involve the artist offering up banal scenarios. They feel designed to bore or irk their viewers, who’ve responded to them with a mixture of confusion and laughter.
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His most famous work stays the 1997 video Vexation Island, by which the artist performs as a seafarer in dated garb who lies asleep on a beach, seemingly alone. For nearly the entire video’s nine-minute runtime, Graham stays in his mysterious slumber. Then, on the very end, he wakes up after a coconut falls on him.
Although Graham had been creating art because the ’70s, Vexation Island is taken into account his breakthrough. It was shown on the 1997 Venice Biennale, where Graham represented Canada. Writing in Artforum, curator Dan Cameron called it “infuriatingly hilarious.”
His first video, Halcion Sleep (1994), could possibly be labeled similarly. It consists of little greater than a grainy long take of the artist asleep within the trunk of a automobile after ingesting Halcion, a drug typically prescribed to people affected by insomnia. As he rests, he’s driven from a hotel to his home. “It was like a reverse-kidnapping form of thing,” Graham once told the Globe and Mail.
©Rodney Graham
Graham was also a performer in a lot of his newer photographs, which have been shown widely and exhibited as lightboxes. He appears in them enacting scenarios that feel each vaguely familiar and barely tough to pin down: a beefy tattooed guy leaning over a balcony, a person in a sterile, retro lecture hall with a TV set parked in front of a chalky blackboard.
A few of these works appeared to have specific referents, equivalent to 2007’s The Gifted Amateur, November 10, 1962, by which Graham poses as an artist spilling yellow paint down a tilted canvas in a midcentury home. The painter Morris Louis, as Recent York Times critic Roberta Smith once noted, died two months before the date noted within the work’s title.
“There’s a roguish charm to Rodney Graham’s art, but it surely is ultimately aloof, as if intended to entertain a celebration of 1, namely himself,” Smith wrote. “The remainder of us can definitely watch if we elect to, but it surely’s not required.”
Watch, a lot of his viewers did, and with glee, too. The author Rachel Kushner once praised a movie by which Graham drops LSD as being “deliberate, precise, complicated—just as you may have suspected.” The artist and musician Kim Gordon once said she loved the lyrics of Graham’s music, which he began producing before he even turned to art.
©Rodney Graham
Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1949. He attended the University of British Columbia for art history and, later, Simon Fraser University, where he was taught by the drummer Ian Wallace. With Wallace, he was a part of the band UJ3RK5, whose members also included the photographer Jeff Wall.
Within the years afterward, Graham could be considered a component of the Vancouver School alongside Wall, Wallace, Stan Douglas, Ken Lum, and Vikky Alexander. All of those artists utilized reproductions and restagings of their photo-based practices to think about the slippery nature of reality, especially when it was filtered through the lens of a camera.
Graham’s earliest works, from the late ’70s and early ’80s, are much more conceptual than the works for which he later became known. A lot of these needed to do with camera obscuras, a tool that may display a flipped image on a wall—essentially a type of projection that dates back to projectors got here into being.
He would photograph trees and exhibit the resulting pictures upside-down, alluding each to this proto-projection technology and to the true nature of vision itself. “Before the brain rights it, the attention sees a tree the other way up in the identical way it appears on the glass back of the big format field camera I exploit,” he once said.
Within the ’80s, he began to make more frequent use of loops in his work, rearranging ready-made text lifted from a Georg Bücher novel until it now not made sense.
©Rodney Graham
Whether he was focused on the Marlboro Man or Rheinmetall typewriters, Graham at all times took up his material with a spirit of great curiosity and playful subversion.
This prolonged to the paintings he produced toward the top of his profession. They looked rather a lot like Cubist masterpieces or ignored modernist gems, but in actual fact, Graham had fastidiously engineered them that way. Viewers interested to learn more would discover that Graham had actually determined their compositions in Photoshop.
By the top of his profession, he had appeared in a single edition each of the Venice Biennale, documenta, and the Whitney Biennial, in addition to a number of other recurring international showcases. He had had retrospectives on the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Museum Voorlinden, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and he had been named to the Order of Canada. But he still remained humble—for essentially the most part.
When Frieze asked in 2007 what he would decide to do if he weren’t an artist, he said, “Being a rock star – hey wait a minute I AM a rock star!”
Rodney Graham, an artist whose dryly funny works about repetition made him one among Canada’s most celebrated artists, died at 73 on Saturday in Vancouver.
In an announcement of his death, his 4 galleries—303 Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, and Esther Schipper—said he had been battling cancer for the past 12 months.
Because the ’90s, Graham has been widely celebrated within the international art world for movies, photographs, paintings, and more that involve the artist offering up banal scenarios. They feel designed to bore or irk their viewers, who’ve responded to them with a mixture of confusion and laughter.
Related Articles
His most famous work stays the 1997 video Vexation Island, by which the artist performs as a seafarer in dated garb who lies asleep on a beach, seemingly alone. For nearly the entire video’s nine-minute runtime, Graham stays in his mysterious slumber. Then, on the very end, he wakes up after a coconut falls on him.
Although Graham had been creating art because the ’70s, Vexation Island is taken into account his breakthrough. It was shown on the 1997 Venice Biennale, where Graham represented Canada. Writing in Artforum, curator Dan Cameron called it “infuriatingly hilarious.”
His first video, Halcion Sleep (1994), could possibly be labeled similarly. It consists of little greater than a grainy long take of the artist asleep within the trunk of a automobile after ingesting Halcion, a drug typically prescribed to people affected by insomnia. As he rests, he’s driven from a hotel to his home. “It was like a reverse-kidnapping form of thing,” Graham once told the Globe and Mail.
©Rodney Graham
Graham was also a performer in a lot of his newer photographs, which have been shown widely and exhibited as lightboxes. He appears in them enacting scenarios that feel each vaguely familiar and barely tough to pin down: a beefy tattooed guy leaning over a balcony, a person in a sterile, retro lecture hall with a TV set parked in front of a chalky blackboard.
A few of these works appeared to have specific referents, equivalent to 2007’s The Gifted Amateur, November 10, 1962, by which Graham poses as an artist spilling yellow paint down a tilted canvas in a midcentury home. The painter Morris Louis, as Recent York Times critic Roberta Smith once noted, died two months before the date noted within the work’s title.
“There’s a roguish charm to Rodney Graham’s art, but it surely is ultimately aloof, as if intended to entertain a celebration of 1, namely himself,” Smith wrote. “The remainder of us can definitely watch if we elect to, but it surely’s not required.”
Watch, a lot of his viewers did, and with glee, too. The author Rachel Kushner once praised a movie by which Graham drops LSD as being “deliberate, precise, complicated—just as you may have suspected.” The artist and musician Kim Gordon once said she loved the lyrics of Graham’s music, which he began producing before he even turned to art.
©Rodney Graham
Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1949. He attended the University of British Columbia for art history and, later, Simon Fraser University, where he was taught by the drummer Ian Wallace. With Wallace, he was a part of the band UJ3RK5, whose members also included the photographer Jeff Wall.
Within the years afterward, Graham could be considered a component of the Vancouver School alongside Wall, Wallace, Stan Douglas, Ken Lum, and Vikky Alexander. All of those artists utilized reproductions and restagings of their photo-based practices to think about the slippery nature of reality, especially when it was filtered through the lens of a camera.
Graham’s earliest works, from the late ’70s and early ’80s, are much more conceptual than the works for which he later became known. A lot of these needed to do with camera obscuras, a tool that may display a flipped image on a wall—essentially a type of projection that dates back to projectors got here into being.
He would photograph trees and exhibit the resulting pictures upside-down, alluding each to this proto-projection technology and to the true nature of vision itself. “Before the brain rights it, the attention sees a tree the other way up in the identical way it appears on the glass back of the big format field camera I exploit,” he once said.
Within the ’80s, he began to make more frequent use of loops in his work, rearranging ready-made text lifted from a Georg Bücher novel until it now not made sense.
©Rodney Graham
Whether he was focused on the Marlboro Man or Rheinmetall typewriters, Graham at all times took up his material with a spirit of great curiosity and playful subversion.
This prolonged to the paintings he produced toward the top of his profession. They looked rather a lot like Cubist masterpieces or ignored modernist gems, but in actual fact, Graham had fastidiously engineered them that way. Viewers interested to learn more would discover that Graham had actually determined their compositions in Photoshop.
By the top of his profession, he had appeared in a single edition each of the Venice Biennale, documenta, and the Whitney Biennial, in addition to a number of other recurring international showcases. He had had retrospectives on the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Museum Voorlinden, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and he had been named to the Order of Canada. But he still remained humble—for essentially the most part.
When Frieze asked in 2007 what he would decide to do if he weren’t an artist, he said, “Being a rock star – hey wait a minute I AM a rock star!”
