Dan Graham

Dan Graham (1942, Urbana, Illinois, USA) lives and works in New York and is one of the central figures in the early Conceptual Art of the 1960s. He grew up in New Jersey and graduated as a self-taught in areas such as anthropology and French literature, without ever having attended university. His work includes photography, performance, video and uses vernacular aesthetics related to rock, punk music magazines, or the universes of suburban architecture, corporate offices or supermarkets. He co-founded and managed for a couple of years the John Daniels Gallery, where he organized the first solo exhibition of Sol LeWitt and exhibitions by Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd. In 1965, he closed the gallery and began his artistic practice, exploring systematic repetition and seriality, as in Homes for America (1966-67), March 31, 1966 (1966) and Schema (March 1966) (1966-67). In the 1970s, performances and videos stand out in particular, where the ambivalence of the spectator, between observer and observed, is deepened. He established a consistent and subversive path, where reflection on architecture is another constant, from Homes for America, a series of photographs around the suburban development of New Jersey accompanied by a critical text, to the creation of architectural structures he called pavilions, designed for gardens or urban contexts that he has been carrying out in various countries since the late 1970s.

In 2001, the important retrospective Works 1965-2000 took place in Serralves Museum, Porto; in 2009, he had his first major American retrospective presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). He participated in the Venice Biennial (1976, 2003, 2005) and five times in Documenta in Kassel, between 1972 and 1997. He has been awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Mixed Media (New York, 1992), the French Vermeil Medal by the City of Paris (2001) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (New York, 2010) and is represented in numerous collections around the world. In addition to being an artist and curator, Graham is a renowned essayist and art critic.                                                                    

CB, janeiro 2021