Rodney Graham. Paintings and Lightboxes

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It is also the gallery’s first show with him since the artist passed away in late 2022, looking specifically at some of the paintings and lightboxes he was working on in the last years of his life. While these two-dimensional works flip between monumental, back-lit photographs and textured, abstract paintings, they also reference a plethora of Graham’s wider interests including filmmaking, literature, music, comedy and art history. The seemingly oppositional media of painting and lightbox photography are also united by the careful processes of staging and collaging together so many diverse elements and influences into singularly memorable and surreal images. Graham employed these twinned techniques of narrative- and world-building throughout his long and varied practice, whether devising one of his many fictional persona – through vast productions involving multiple props and elaborate sets – or while constructing new cubistic paintings from older examples, collaging these fragments and then committing them to canvas.