2017 Catalogue Archive

Rodney Graham casts himself as different characters in his multimedia works, playing off of his own identity through exaggerated personas he documents in film, photographs, and large lightbox pieces. Graham’s paintings show a similar tendency to quote historical influences. For the Small Modernist Painting series, he produces intimate works that reference the abstract expressionist tradition stylistically, though they are painted on source material, book pages, and records. Graham-as-abstract-painter becomes another persona for the artist to inhabit, skewering the lore of great art historical figures while also allowing the artist to produce paintings with skill and an obvious affection for the medium. Often compared to his contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, Graham has been exhibiting internationally since the 1970s.