Rodney Graham

You should be an artist

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

The artist as a character has been a recurrent topic Rodney Graham used in his well-known light boxes. For the first time, the Canadian artist puts together works and props centered on this issue. From the seminal fictionnal performance Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong 1969 (2006) to the last light box produced for the exhibition Artist in Artist Bar, 2016, the exhibition presents 6 large light boxes, a video projection, and a large series of props used in the works: paintings, sculptures, and photo.
The artist as a character is a way Rodney Graham deals with history of art, through self-portraits captured in precise settings playing with some clichés of modernism and post-modernism, or even folk art. The paintings and sculptures are displayed separately from the light boxes, bringing them into a full status of artworks when they were designed as props and accessories for the photographic compositions.
Fiction becomes reality.
—Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim