Dan Graham (1942-2022)
303 Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Regen Projects mourn a great artist, Dan Graham, who sadly passed away on February 19th in New York. His influence over the past half century as a writer, photographer, architect, sculptor, filmmaker and performance artist is widely felt in the contemporary art world, with many of his groundbreaking endeavours in video, installation and audience participation – including such legendary and confrontational works as Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975) and Public Spaces/Two Audiences (1976) – among the first and most enduring examples ever created in those fields.
Despite his recent disavowal of Conceptual Art as a term, he was one of its earliest pioneers through early text-based works, typographic wall pieces and schematic poems, not to mention the seminal illustrated magazine essay, Homes for America (1966). He exhibited the work of his peers Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson at the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he was briefly the curator and director, before showing alongside these and many other Minimalists and Conceptualists during the 1960s and 70s.
The main focus of Graham’s art since the late 1970s was an ongoing series of public architectural installations, which he called pavilions, derived from geometric forms and rendered in plate glass, two-way mirror, and steel armatures. Graham intended his pavilions to function as punctuation marks, pausing or altering the experience of physical space, providing momentary diversion for romance or play, or else as places to delve into other activities, like reading or viewing videos. These deceptively simple structures recall many of the artist’s earlier experiments with perception, reflection, and refraction, but depart from them in their non-gallery setting as long-term additions to the landscape.
Graham had an encyclopedic sphere of references and wrote about everything from Dean Martin and rock music to astrology and urban architecture. He is survived by his wife, the artist Mieko Meguro. His wit, generosity and irascibility will be sorely missed by all who knew him. Our deepest sympathies are with his family and friends.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2018 Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Sirius Arts Centre, County Cork, Ireland
2017 Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing
Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
2016 The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus
2015 MAMO, Marseille, France
ETH Zurich, Zurich
2014 Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2011 Le Consortium, Dijon
Kunstmuseum Sankt Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland
2010 Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan
2009 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Portikus, Frankfurt am Main
2006 Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy
2005 Venice Biennale, Italy
2003 Venice Biennale, Italy
2001 Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal
1997 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK
dOCUMENTA 10, Kassel, Germany
1993 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
1992 dOCUMENTA 9, Kassel, Germany
1983 Kunsthalle Berne, Bern, Switzerland
1982 dOCUMENTA 7, Kassel, Germany
1981 Renaissance Society, University of Chicago
1977 dOCUMENTA 6, Kassel, Germany
1976 Venice Biennale, Italy
1972 dOCUMENTA 5, Kassel, Germany
AWARDS
2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
2001 French Vermeil Medal awarded by the City of Paris
1992 Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich, Switzerland
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
MOCA | The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver
Tate Collection, London
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Generali Foundation, Vienna
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna
Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf
Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art modern, Paris
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Moderna Museet, Stockholm