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31/10/2013

Rodney Graham / Rashid Johnson

Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

Rodney Graham
The Four Seasons

Nestled between snow-covered mountains and the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Vancouver is the most extraordinary city; it is at once remote and removed from the centre of the Western World, yet it sustains the vibrancy of a thriving modern metropolis. One of the most distinguished representatives of this city’s vibrant art scene is Rodney Graham. He has created a practice which operates through systems of quotation, reference and adaptation, working with diverse media such as film, photography, installation, painting, music and text.

In his photographic work, each image is a fictional self-portrait, with the artist costumed but always recognisable, portraying a variety of characters. Graham has produced this new work both in his Vancouver studio and in public leisure facilities throughout the city. Four lightboxes, created between 2011 and 2013, will be unveiled together for the first time and presented under the exhibition title, ‘The Four Seasons’. Graham did not originally conceive these works as a series, but, he says, they evolved into a series ‘organically’. Dedicated to the four seasons, these meticulously staged mis-en-scènes represent the artist’s major late body of work. Over the past three years, the artist and his team worked tirelessly until they reached the point of perfection.

The first of these works to be photographed was ‘Betula Pendula Fastigiata (Sous Chef on Smoke Break)’. The subject was inspired by a scene that the artist witnessed behind a restaurant on Vancouver’s main street: a member of the kitchen staff taking a smoke break.He resolved to make a work from the situation but decided to transfer the image to a park. Graham wanted to make a reference to his own position in the art world:

‘In this work I wanted to make a kind of reference to my previous ‘portraits’ of trees. This tree is identified too with a tag (it is after all in an arboretum) as a member of the birch family. I was quite conscious of the fact that a sous-chef works under a chef as a subordinate, and in this case I am also subordinate to the tree, as the title (which identifies the tree first) indicates.’

Another smoke break that the artist witnessed in Vancouver inspired him to make the second work in the series: ‘Smoke Break 2 (Drywaller)’. It was a dry-waller standing on stilts in front of a building under construction:

‘I thought it was an interesting idea to make a kind of sequel to the first smoke break picture and re-enact this piece in my studio, which was also under construction at the time. In my picture I was curious to explore the painterly aspects of the plastering of drywall as I have always appreciated the quality of patterns of white plaster on the cool grey drywall panels. The heating unit in the right panel is of the kind used to speed up the drying process but here it suggests a kind of warming campfire as the white pattern on the grey wall behind me suggests snow in a wintry grey sky.’

With summer and winter completed, in the autumn of 2012 Graham started to work on the large three-panel work that was to represent autumn: ‘Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour’.
He says:

‘I had long wanted to do a work based on Thomas Eakins’ great ‘Max Schmitt in a Single Scull’, and here I transposed the scene into a contemporary setting with me playing a recreational kayaker pausing on a trip up the Seymour River in Vancouver. This is the only ‘break’ in the series in which I am not smoking. My assistant Josh Olson reminds me that it is rather an ‘oxygen break’.’

In Graham’s adaptation the environment is much less idyllic, with a rusty bridge and shabby industrial buildings in the background. While Schmitt and a companion seem to enjoy their activity in Eakin’s painting, Graham’s look towards the camera seems to be a rather bewildered and distressed one.

The ‘Actor/Director, 1954’, referring to spring and created this year, is the only work in an historical setting. It was directly inspired by an image, a publicity still of the actor/director Eric von Stroheim looking through a camera while wearing one of his Ruritanian military costumes.

‘In my work I wanted to continue my tradition of self-portraiture and set it in a double past. Thus I appear in 18th century costume on a film set representing a park in Versailles in what the fake apple blossoms clearly indicate as Spring. I am pausing from my work as an actor to set up an insert shot of my own hat on a park bench. The camera is an old 3 reel Technicolor one, discontinued in 1954, the year in which the picture is set.’
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a text by the artist and an essay by Dorothea Zwirner.

Rodney Graham (born 1949) lives and works in Vancouver. Significant solo exhibitions include: Vancouver Art Gallery (2012); a retrospective at MACBA, Barcelona (2010), travelling to Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; MoCA Los Angeles (2004); ICA Philadelphia (2005), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2002), and Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin (2001). The artist was included in Documenta IX (1992), the Venice Biennale in 1997, the Whitney Biennial in 2006, and is currently represented at the 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh PA.

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Rashid Johnson
The Gathering

Hauser & Wirth is excited to announce Rashid Johnson’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, ‘The Gathering’, comprising over a dozen new works including sculpture, painting and video. For this exhibition, Johnson will unveil a new series of abstract portraits which he refers to as ‘characters’.

To make these new works, Johnson begins with a panel made from wood flooring, arranged in a geometric composition and sprayed with gold enamel paint. He then takes a blow torch to the surface and burns off almost all of the paint, leaving behind a golden aura with hints of other colours left by the paint residue. Using this surface as his canvas, the artist applies his signature black soap and wax mixture, creating a gestural form that resembles a figure. The abstracted form of these ‘characters’ was inspired in part by Johnson’s recent re-reading of Albert Camus’ ‘L‘Étranger’, in particular a memorable scene in which the rays of the sun obscure Meursault’s vision of the Arab.

Figuration has played a significant role in Johnson’s work since the earliest days of his career – in a series of photographic portraits of homeless men in Chicago – but here it finds a place in his painting practice for the first time. A group of ‘characters’ of different scales gather in a single room of the exhibition, suggesting the ‘gathering’ that the artist refers to in the exhibition’s title.

The exhibition will also include several new wood wall sculptures with shelves supporting found objects. Marking a departure from his previous wood wall works, in this exhibition Johnson makes the edges of the works uneven, revealing the wooden floor boards from which the panels are made. With shamanistic inspiration from both African-American and Art history, many of Johnson’s works employ materials in a way that suggests an indefinite form of mysticism and a role as devotional objects, and these sculptures suggest a use as altars or shrines. In fact, the artist has said that he likes the idea of these objects literally being put to use: the books on the shelves being read and contemplated, the shea butter being rubbed on elbows, the records being played, and so forth.

‘Everybody’s a Star’ is a new black mirror work that Johnson has created for his Zurich show, and is his largest to date. Comprised of hundreds of pieces of black mirrored tile, the surface is splattered and built up with black soap and wax on two planes: first on the floor, with the artist standing above, pouring onto and working into the mirrored panels below; and then on the wall, the drips down the face of the work bearing witness to this axial shift.

Hanging on the gallery’s back wall is ‘The Hour of Chaos’, a large gridded steel structure, displaying a vinyl album, shea butter, books and plants. These objects are reminiscent of relics or offerings; the outline of the shelves echoing the lines of a constructivist painting. On the floor near this sculpture sits a work comprising of a Persian rug, a material the artist has employed in recent years, piled with oversized blocks of shea butter
and resting below an array of plants hanging from the ceiling. Originating from Africa, shea butter is admired for its soothing and healing properties. The Persian rug refers both to psychoanalysis (Johnson is struck by the abundance of them in photographs of Sigmund Freud’s office) and to his personal history, as his wife is of Iranian descent. The notion of nurture is carried forward with the artist’s installation of palm and spider plants that hang from the gallery ceiling, encompassing works and leading visitors through the gallery space
beneath a living canopy.

Johnson’s most recent video work, ‘Samuel in Space’ is presented on a monitor placed on another rug in the centre of the main gallery space. Filmed in Marfa, Texas, ‘Samuel in Space’ continues a trajectory that began with ‘The New Black Yoga’, a dance-like movement piece originally inspired by Johnson’s attempts to learn yoga while in Berlin, where his inability to understand German thwarted both his physical and intellectual mastery of the poses. Shot on location in and around Marfa, ‘Samuel in Space’ depicts a black male dancer moving (or tumbling) through the high desert at sunrise, seemingly laying claim to and revelling in the landscape.
Johnson’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘New Growth’, Ballroom Marfa, TX (2013); ‘Shelter’, South London Gallery, London, England (2012); ‘Rumble’, Hauser & Wirth New York NY (2012) and the major touring survey exhibition ‘Message to Our Folks’ which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL (2012) and travelled to Miami Art Museum, Miami FL (2012), High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA (2012) and most recently Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis MO, where it will be on view until January 2014.

Image: Rashid Johnson, Bootsy, 2013, Burned red oak flooring, black soap, wax, spray enamel 245.1 x 184.2 x 7.6 cm / 96 1/2 x 72 1/2 x 3 in © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Martin Parsekian

Press Contact:
Anna Helwing +41 44 4466517 anna@hauserwirth.com
Amelia Redgrift +44 207 2558247 amelia@hauserwirth.com

Opening: Friday 1 November, 6 – 8 pm

Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich
Gallery hours:
Tuesday to Friday, 11 am – 6 pm
Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm

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