Rodney Graham ― Lightboxes

Hardly any other contemporary artist has devoted himself to searching for traces left behind by different ways of life in the 19th and 20th centuries as the Canadian Rodney Graham (b. 1949). Since the 1970s, he has been working on a rhizome-like, conceptual oeuvre that has never shied away from new jumps in time or genre. His work combines film, photography, installation, performance, painting, literature, and music. Graham, who, along with artists such as Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas, belongs to the »Vancouver School«, appropriates styles, trends, and discourses from the era of romanticism through to post-modernity, commenting or expanding on them or rethinking them with an understated irony. This book, designed in close co-operation with the artist, accompanies the exhibition at Museum Frieder Burda. It presents Graham’s 36 photo light boxes from 2000 to the present, among them key works like the Newspaper Man. The central focus is on the manifold ways in which Graham has staged himself. He always gives the impression of a melancholy time traveler, a modern-day Buster Keaton, negotiating the trials and tribulations of modern culture in various guises and in doing so, slipping into the role of producer, observer or mediator.

Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover (where he was the recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize), and the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, Austria. He has been included in recent group exhibitions at La Maison Rouge, Paris; Vancouver Art Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco.