Corbett vs. Dempsey is deeply honored to present Secondary Modern, an exhibition of paintings by Rodney Graham. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist and the artist’s first in Chicago since his untimely death in 2022. 

With his paintings, Rodney Graham reversed time’s arrow.

Convention, amongst conceptual artists, is for their painting practice to come first, to precede their transformation into full-fledged conceptualists. In Graham’s case, paintings came later, as part of his complex of different artistic activities, which included the photographic lightboxes for which he is best known, but also films, books, performances, songwriting, singing, bandleading, record making, sculpture, installation art, bakery ownership, and more. Among the personae the Vancouver-based artist created for his photographs were several art world archetypes – the collector, the dealer, and the artist. Graham inserted his own paintings into these works, in part as props, but also as the productions of an actual studio practice, which he reported finding “absorbing to a frightening degree.” The initial paintings, which incorporated many ideas from canonic modernist movements such as the School of Paris, CoBrA, and Abstract Expressionism, appeared in 2003 with a presentation of monochromatic works at the Venice Biennale, and continued in 2005 with his exhibition Picasso, My Master, at Johnen Galerie in Berlin, and in 2007 with Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles at Lisson Gallery in London. All of these were small scale and most of them were painted directly by him. He went on to create a series of 84 huge, shaped panel paintings featuring permutations of two abstract designs from a satirical cartoon from an obscure 1950s pulp magazine; these were shown at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in 2009. In subsequent works, what we might call Graham’s “early late” paintings, developed during the 2010s and continuing until his death, Graham borrowed visual elements from these original paintings, cut and pasted them together using a digital program, blew them up to monumental scale, and had them executed by studio assistants in order to change their facture.

In Secondary Modern, CvsD presents seven of the “late early” canvases from 2004/5, small modernist paintings that are at once marvelous inventions of Rodney Graham and are at the same time, one step removed from that earnest endeavor, they are meditations on what it means to be a modern painting. Augmenting these rare examples of the first painterly output are two large-scale "early late" paintings from 2022, equally masterful, equally droll. In these incredible paintings, Graham seems to wonder how an object can be something and be a quotation of that thing at the same time.

Image: Rodney Graham, Untitled, 2022, oil and sand on linen, 72 x 60 inches, 77 5/8 x 65 5/8 x 2 5/8 inches, framed.