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Since the 1980s, Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham has grown his diverse practice to encompass photography, painting, sculpture, film, video and music. As actor, performer, producer, historian, writer, poet, sound engineer and musician, Graham shifts seamlessly into different roles and characters. For his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Graham presents a new series of his signature photographic lightbox works - elaborate, allegorical and witty compositions focusing on his use of the self-portrait to explore scenarios from our collective cultural memory. In addition, two new collage series that reference Graham's artistic personae and career as musician are displayed for the first time. The presentation precedes the artist's retrospective at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England in March 2017, subsequently travelling to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland.

In Graham's lightbox works each image is a fictional self-portrait with the artist in costume but always recognisable, portraying a vast array of characters. From the props and their placement within the frame, to the elaborate costumes and stage sets, each scene - either in his Vancouver studio or in public facilities around the city - is purposefully constructed and executed with an exceptional degree of technical expertise and humour. In 'Dinner Break (Salisbury Steak)' (2017), Graham takes the guise of a 1960s jazz drummer breaking for dinner during a performance at a nightclub, his hands poised with knife and fork above the plate as if they were drumsticks. The set for 'Antiquarian Sleeping in His Shop' (2017) is drawn from visits to various antique shops around Vancouver; Graham plays a collector sleeping amongst the menagerie of objects. 'News Paper Spy' (2017) belongs to an ongoing series that utilises newspapers. Here Graham hides cartoonishly behind a newspaper with cut eyeholes, making subtle reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous last work 'Étant donnés' (1946 - 1966) and Pablo Picasso's appropriation of African masks.

The exhibition's title, 'Media Studies', relates to the large number of works that take film and media for their subject. 'Coat Puller' (2017) layers manifold cinematic references - the photograph's dramatic, foreboding shadow is reminiscent of German Expressionist films such as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and the set mimics Alfred Hitchcock's early film 'The Lodger', which takes place in a 1920s boarding house. A male figure leans for his coat, the photograph capturing the beauty of a mundane and awkward action, much like Eadweard Muybridge's studies of motion. 'Media Studies '77' (2016) gently mocks the inception of Media Studies as an academic subject - a dandy-esque Professor clad in flared corduroy trousers, suede jacket and sunglasses, casually smokes at the front of his classroom in which both the chalkboard and TV screen are blank.

'Media Studies' also offers the opportunity of viewing two new collage series. Like so much of Graham's work, they revel in nostalgia and historical pop culture. In the group of small-scale collages on board, glossy images of Dean Martin and Alain Delon ripped from magazines are pasted alongside scraps of texts and vintage adverts, then overlaid with brightly coloured spray-paint. The large-scale collages are realised on canvas or linen and read as paintings. The collage elements are drawn from a cache of Circus, a 1980s rock magazine that championed the era's 'hair metal' bands. In some, the magazine pages are attached with gesso, in others, peeled-off revealing a transfer of the image akin to the effect used by Robert Rauschenberg. Graham cites Robert Rauschenberg and Franz West as his primary inspiration for the series, stating 'I am interested in using these images in a formal way. I often obscure the former rock stars to make them anonymous. I could almost say the subject matter is of no particular interest to me, except, ironically, as a repository for obsolete fantasies'. Premeditated or not, the musical references in this body of work speak to Graham's bond with and lifelong interest in music and its history.

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or his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Graham presents a new series of his signature photographic lightbox works - elaborate, allegorical and witty compositions focusing on his use of the self-portrait to explore scenarios from our collective cultural memory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since the 1980s, Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham has grown his diverse practice to encompass photography, painting, sculpture, film, video and music. As actor, performer, producer, historian, writer, poet, sound engineer and musician, Graham shifts seamlessly into different roles and characters. For his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Graham presents a new series of his signature photographic lightbox works - elaborate, allegorical and witty compositions focusing on his use of the self-portrait to explore scenarios from our collective cultural memory. In addition, two new collage series that reference Graham's artistic personae and career as musician are displayed for the first time. The presentation precedes the artist's retrospective at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England in March 2017, subsequently travelling to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland.

In Graham's lightbox works each image is a fictional self-portrait with the artist in costume but always recognisable, portraying a vast array of characters. From the props and their placement within the frame, to the elaborate costumes and stage sets, each scene - either in his Vancouver studio or in public facilities around the city - is purposefully constructed and executed with an exceptional degree of technical expertise and humour. In 'Dinner Break (Salisbury Steak)' (2017), Graham takes the guise of a 1960s jazz drummer breaking for dinner during a performance at a nightclub, his hands poised with knife and fork above the plate as if they were drumsticks. The set for 'Antiquarian Sleeping in His Shop' (2017) is drawn from visits to various antique shops around Vancouver; Graham plays a collector sleeping amongst the menagerie of objects. 'News Paper Spy' (2017) belongs to an ongoing series that utilises newspapers. Here Graham hides cartoonishly behind a newspaper with cut eyeholes, making subtle reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous last work 'Étant donnés' (1946 - 1966) and Pablo Picasso's appropriation of African masks.

The exhibition's title, 'Media Studies', relates to the large number of works that take film and media for their subject. 'Coat Puller' (2017) layers manifold cinematic references - the photograph's dramatic, foreboding shadow is reminiscent of German Expressionist films such as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and the set mimics Alfred Hitchcock's early film 'The Lodger', which takes place in a 1920s boarding house. A male figure leans for his coat, the photograph capturing the beauty of a mundane and awkward action, much like Eadweard Muybridge's studies of motion. 'Media Studies '77' (2016) gently mocks the inception of Media Studies as an academic subject - a dandy-esque Professor clad in flared corduroy trousers, suede jacket and sunglasses, casually smokes at the front of his classroom in which both the chalkboard and TV screen are blank.

'Media Studies' also offers the opportunity of viewing two new collage series. Like so much of Graham's work, they revel in nostalgia and historical pop culture. In the group of small-scale collages on board, glossy images of Dean Martin and Alain Delon ripped from magazines are pasted alongside scraps of texts and vintage adverts, then overlaid with brightly coloured spray-paint. The large-scale collages are realised on canvas or linen and read as paintings. The collage elements are drawn from a cache of Circus, a 1980s rock magazine that championed the era's 'hair metal' bands. In some, the magazine pages are attached with gesso, in others, peeled-off revealing a transfer of the image akin to the effect used by Robert Rauschenberg. Graham cites Robert Rauschenberg and Franz West as his primary inspiration for the series, stating 'I am interested in using these images in a formal way. I often obscure the former rock stars to make them anonymous. I could almost say the subject matter is of no particular interest to me, except, ironically, as a repository for obsolete fantasies'. Premeditated or not, the musical references in this body of work speak to Graham's bond with and lifelong interest in music and its history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
or his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Graham presents a new series of his signature photographic lightbox works - elaborate, allegorical and witty compositions focusing on his use of the self-portrait to explore scenarios from our collective cultural memory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rodney Graham pulls at the threads of cultural and intellectual history through photography, film, music, performance and painting. He presents cyclical narratives that pop with puns and references to literature and philosophy, from Lewis Carroll to Sigmund Freud to Kurt Cobain, with a sense of humour that betrays Graham's footing in the post-punk scene of late 1970s Vancouver. The nine-minute loop Vexation Island (1997) presents the artist as a 17th-century sailor, lying unconscious under a coconut tree with a bruise on his head; after eight and a half minutes he gets up and shakes the tree inducing a coconut to fall and knock him out, and for the sequence to start again. Graham returns as a cowboy in How I Became a Ramblin' Man (1999) and as both city dandy and country bumpkin in City Self/Country Self (2001) - fictional characters all engaged in an endless loop of activity. Such dream states and the ramblings of the unconscious are rooted in Graham's earlier upside-down photographs of oak trees. Inversion, Graham explains, has a logic: 'You don't have to delve very deeply into modern physics to realise that the scientific view holds that the world is really not as it appears. Before the brain rights it, the eye sees a tree upside down in the same way it appears on the glass back of the large format field camera I use.' (2005)

Rodney Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, Burnaby, Canada in 1971 and lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Solo exhibitions include Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2017); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Le Constortium, Dijon, France (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2012); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2011); Museu D'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA, USA (2004); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2002); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2001); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (1999). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the Carnegie International (2013), the 13th, 14th and 17th Sydney Biennales, Australia (2002, 2006, 2010), the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2006) and the Biennale d'Art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto, Canada (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in visual arts, British Columbia, Canada (2011). Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.

Current & Recent Projects:
'Artists and Models', Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland, 24 October 2020 - 18 April 2021

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Rodney Graham pulls at the threads of cultural and intellectual history through photography, film, music, performance and painting. He presents cyclical narratives that pop with puns and references to literature and philosophy, from Lewis Carroll to Sigmund Freud to Kurt Cobain, with a ...

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Dior Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2021 Collection

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Since 1963, Michael Werner Gallery has worked with some of the most important European and American artists of the 20th Century.

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Akris Fall/Winter 2017-18 collection inspiration by Albert Kriemler