Rodney Graham: You should be an artist

About

Several works mounted on light boxes will be proposed, and will echo paintings or films instituting a dialogue between the compositions. Rodney Graham presents for the first time the objects and materials used to make the caissons. Some works will be unpublished.

The protean work of Rodney Graham, born in 1949 in Vancouver where he lives and works today, plays perceptions, and the so tenuous link between reality and fiction. The artist is famous for his light boxes at scale 1 and his stagings that seem to come from archival images. Between photographs, films, videos, models, musical scores, he is interested in fixed narrative structures, not devoid of a sense of sharp humor, exploring the possibilities of the different media that the artist uses. The texts are present in each of his works, represented by pages of newspapers or volumes. They are at the same time literature but also objects possessing a spatial dimension in their own right. The artist is most often the actor of his work, posing the question of self-representation, the artist and his posture vis-à-vis his achievements.

Rodney Graham invented new scenarios for each of his accomplishments, giving rise to a varied and difficult work to characterize. If the artist is very interested in the history of art, its relation to modernity and postmodernity remains complex. From a group of conceptual artists in Vancouver in the 1970s, his work is rich in references - and in abyss - that they belong to psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), philosophy, literature (Edgar Allan Pœ), music (Black Sabbath or Wagner), cinema (Alfred Hichcock) or the popular registry. Graham describes his work as "annexation," recreating existing works or reusing multiple texts. He has written additional passages to the writings of Edgar Allan Pœ, re-used Donald Judd's sculptures, borrowed measures from Wagner in some of his musical creations. In the 70's, Rodney Graham formed a band with D Other Vancouver artists. Author and composer, his songs are called "idioms-popular". Like its plastic productions, the music that the artist realizes comes from popular and varied references such as rock, folk and country.

The artist studied literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1968 to 1971 and then became interested in art in the early 1970s. It has been the subject of important exhibitions and retrospectives, Represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and Documenta IX in Cassel in 1992. His last major exhibition in France was in 2009 at Jeu de Paume where he was presented alongside Harun Farocki.

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With the support of: Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris 
thanks: 303 Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Zürich; Lisson Gallery, New York; Ringier Collection, Zürich; David Roberts Collection, London; Sammlung Goetz, Munich