Rodney Graham, influential Canadian conceptual artist with a wry sense of humour, has died, aged 73

Rodney Graham, a polyvalent conceptual artist whose work ranged throughout many media however maintained an indefatigable steadiness of rigour and irreverence, died on 22 October. He was 73 years outdated and had been preventing most cancers for the earlier yr, in accordance with a press release launched by his household.

Graham was born (in 1949), lived and died in Vancouver, a metropolis whose famend cohort of conceptually inclined photographers had an early and lasting affect on his work. He studied beneath Vancouver College members Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, although not like their cool, enigmatic imagery, Graham’s work shortly distinguished itself by its elements of efficiency and provocation. Along with images, his follow expanded to include sculpture, movie, video and, particularly in recent times, portray.

“After I began on the College of British Columbia, it was photo-conceptual. Conceptual artwork was the primary focus. I come from a barely extra literary predilection in order that was galvanising to me—the probabilities of artwork from a conceptual perspective,” Graham stated in an interview for The Quietus in 2018. “I didn’t undergo a portray part, it was solely later that I started portray. I used to be all the time extra on the Duchamp aspect than Picasso. It took a very long time for me to begin dabbling in portray however it’s one thing I very a lot get pleasure from doing.”

After exhibiting primarily at Canadian museums and European galleries within the Nineteen Seventies and 80s, Graham made an indelible impression on the worldwide artwork world on the 1997 Venice Biennale, the place he represented Canada with the comedian movie Vexation Island (1997). Like lots of his nonetheless and transferring picture works, the movie stars Graham, on this occasion wearing costume as a shipwrecked seventeenth century mariner with a bloody damage on his brow. For a lot of the movie’s nine-minute run he lies unconscious within the sand, lastly waking up, shaking a close-by palm tree and being knocked unconscious by a coconut, shortly after which the movie loops.

His star flip in Venice was adopted by solo exhibitions at Canada’s Nationwide Gallery (in 1999), the Dia Artwork Basis (2000), Hamburger Bahnhof (2001), the Whitechapel Gallery (2002) and the Museum of Modern Artwork in Los Angeles (2004). In 2017, the Baltic Centre for Modern Artwork in Gateshead opened a significant retrospective of his work. Vexation Island’s mixture of sysphisian gravitas and slapstick humour, all rendered with excellent manufacturing values, was typical of the movies, movies and large-format, back-lit cibachromes Graham would make for the following quarter-century. He was typically the primary character in his compositions, sporting elaborate costumes, make-up and prosthetics—remodeling him right into a mid-century artwork supplier, a Nineteen Sixties college professor, a dejected AbEx painter, an exuberant hippie, a cowboy outlaw and extra.

“We’ve misplaced our expensive Rodney, a genius artist, expensive buddy, grasp of disguise, snappy dresser, provider of dry humour, a tremendous songwriter, all the time modest, an understated mental, gifted novice, skilled connoisseur, Sunday painter who seldom labored Sundays, in the end a real skilled in each sense of what it means to be an artist,” Nicholas Logsdail, the founding father of Lisson Gallery, stated in a press release. (Graham confirmed with Lisson, 303 Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle and Esther Schipper.)

Along with his wide-ranging creative follow, Graham was a lifelong musician, commonly releasing basic rock songs along with his Rodney Graham Band, although he regarded the undertaking as a pastime.

In 2019, a $3.6m public artwork set up debuted in his hometown, ruffling some feathers and making manifest a chaotically spinning chandelier that appeared in one in every of his movies. That work, Spinning Chandelier (2014), now lights up, descends from a bridge over Granville Island and spins for 4 minutes 3 times daily. Graham defined his need to achieve a wider viewers along with his work in a sometimes playful, earnest reply to a query about his current collection of works targeted on artists of their studios throughout a 2013 interview with Flash Artwork.

“I assume this occurred fairly instantly—a mystical epiphany in Venice once I noticed that huge polychrome sculpture of Jeff Koons having intercourse along with his porn star girlfriend and member of the parliament. He actually raised the bar. I believed it was time to ramp it up,” he instructed Flash Artwork. “I believe works like this made lots of people really feel ineffectual, like Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton after they first heard Jimi Hendrix! I believe I made Vexation Island after that, which concerned a number of monetary hypothesis on my half. I put every part I had into it, and it ended up being a hit. It was a really thrilling time and I turned transformed to creating works with extra fashionable attraction.”