Rodney Graham is a Canadian artist best known for his conceptual practice that includes photography, film, performance, painting and music. His multidisciplinary artworks investigate different narratives of popular culture, literature, nature and philosophy and merge them with personal experience and historical reference.
Read MoreGraham lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Graham was born in 1949 in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada.
Between 1968 and 1971, Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 1979 and 1980, he attended Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, where Ian Wallace, a Vancouver artist interested in Conceptualism, taught him. While studying, Graham began to play guitar with Wallace and fellow artist Jeff Wall in the art rock band U-J3RK5.
Throughout the 1980s Graham became associated with The Vancouver School, a grouping of Vancouver artists exploring conceptual photography. Artists including Wallace, Wall, Ken Lum and Roy Arden were associated with the group. The Vancouver School made Vancouver an important city for contemporary art and gave Canada wider recognition in the international art market.
Vexation Island (1997) is Rodney Graham's most well-known artwork.
Shot in 35mm, Graham's short film is screened in a loop and depicts a shipwrecked character on a small tropical island. Graham plays the protagonist, who we first encounter under a palm tree with a large wound on his forehead. He stands up to look out to sea, then returns to the coconut palm which he begins to shake. Expectedly, a coconut comes loose and falls on his head. He stumbles while the coconut rolls towards the sea. Viewers are shown different camera angles of the coconut falling and rolling, until the film begins again.
Graham's tropical island is host to a character in an inescapable loop. By casting himself as the only character in a never-ending plot that verges on absurd, Graham considers the different relationships between the natural world and civilisation. Vexation Island also reflects on the tradition of linear narratives. Graham introduces humour, irony and absurdity to the narrative by displacing and remodelling traditional stories.
Graham often casts himself as the lead protagonist of his films. The films How I Became a Ramblin' Man (1999), City Self/Country Self (2000) and Phonokinetoscope (2001) all feature Graham acting as a fictional character engaged in an infinite loop of activity. His films are often inspired by and reference well-known writers and musicians including Sigmund Freud, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe and Kurt Cobain.
Welsh Oaks #1 (1998) is a series of photographs shot on a large format camera that depicts ancient oak trees in the English countryside. Graham inverts the photographs so that the trees are cast upside down. By experimenting with the work and the way it is displayed, Graham transforms the oak trees into something unfamiliar and disorientating. Welsh Oaks #1 shifts perspectives of the natural landscape by placing the sky where the ground should be and swapping clouds for tree roots.
In 1997, Graham was invited to represent Canada in the 47th Venice Biennale with his film Vexation Island.
In 2011, Graham was awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts. In 2006, he received the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung's Kurt Schwitters Prize.
Graham's artwork is included in the collections of galleries and institutions all over the world. Selected collections include the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the ARCO Foundation Collection in Madrid; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Dia Art Foundation in New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and the Tate Modern in London.
Rodney Graham has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions.
Selected solo exhibitions include Painting Problems, Lisson Gallery, London (2020); Central Questions of Philosophy, Lisson Gallery, London (2018); Rodney Graham: That's Not Me, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2017); Rodney Graham: Canadian Impressionist, Canada House, London (2017); Media Studies, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2017); Waterloo Billboard Commissions, Hayward Gallery, London (2016); Kitchen Magic Drawings, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2015); Rodney Graham: Props and Other Paintings, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2014); The Four Seasons, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2013); Through the Forest, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2010-11); Awakening, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago (2006).
Select group exhibitions include En la casa de Marquès, Casa Museo Can Marquès, Palma de Mallorca, hosted by Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin (2021); OVR: Miami Beach/Painting Protocols, Lisson Gallery (online), London (2020); SALON D'HIVER, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2020); (SELF) PORTRAITS, Parkett, Zürich (2020); Staging Identity, Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Darmstadt (2020-21); Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery, London (2020); Tables, Carpets & Dead Flowers, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2018); Prelude/Subversion, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2016); Camera of Wonders, with KADIST, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City (2015—16); Corner Thru, CHOI&LAGER Gallery, Cologne (2013); Les Dérives de l'imaginaire, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012-13).
Rodney Graham's representing gallery website can be found here.
Ocula | 2022
