Dan Graham, a multi media artist, was born on March 31, 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. Graham started his career by opening the John Daniels Gallery in New York in 1964 at age 22. This gallery was also the site of Graham’s first solo show four years after the opening. Graham’s work has been described as a combination of performance art, sculpture, video art, installations, and photography. A good amount of Graham’s early work from the 1960’s was performance and film based that explored how the audience would react when incorporated in the artwork itself. Graham’s early work has been described with minimalistic qualitities where the work is focused on the experience the artwork creates for the viewer. His currently works mostly with sculpture and architecture. His current work with glass and mirrors continues to explore that same idea of the audience being integrated into the structure.
Graham’s recent structures, what he calls his pavilions, are usually constructed out of wood lattice, mirror, glass, and steel. 1981 marked his decade long stint with his “Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon.” Working with fellow architects Mojdeh Baratloo and Clifton Balch, the three designed this rooftop urban park project-taking place in Chelsea, New York. An article from the Dia website describes the pavilion “a two-way mirrored glass, the walls of the pavilion shift between transparent and reflective states as the intensity of light changes, creating changing and complex visual effects with the sky, surrounding landscape, and interactions with people on the roof.” In an article by Lynne Cooke on the Chelsea Rooftop Project, she explains how Graham’s minimalist past reverberates through this project and said that “its origins lie as much in Minimal art of the sixties, which was often aligned with the purely formal characteristics of the physical contexts in which it was devised and displayed, and as in Modernist architectural styles and (earlier) architectural typologies that range from the gazebo to the pergola, from the conservatory to the contemporary atrium”. This project has become one of Graham’s most well known works.
Graham has had several solo exhibits and has won a great amount of awards throughout his art career. His solo exhibits consist of the Kunst-Werke Berlin, in Berlin in 1999, the Storefront for Art an Architecture in NY in 1986, a solo show at P.S.1 in New York in 1981, and a show at the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in 1977. Graham received the French Vermeil Medal from the City of Paris in 2001, the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award in 1992, and the Skowhegan Medal for Mixed Media from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in New York in 1992.
Graham currently has an exhibit showing at the Moca Museum in Los Angeles. Titled “Beyond” is his “first North American retrospective of the art of Dan Graham, examining his entire body of work in a focused selection of photographs, films and video, architectural models, indoor and outdoor pavilions, conceptual projects for magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings” (from the MOCA.org website). The exhibit “traces the evolution of his practice across each of its major stages, while asserting ongoing themes, most notably, the changing relationship of the individual to society as filtered through American mass media and architecture at the end of the 20th century.”
MOCA L.A. article
Marian Goodman Gallery NY
Dia Article
Lynne Cooke Article
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