“I suppose all of my painting is a kind of pastiche,” says Rodney Graham, “but the new series specifically comes out of every type of painting that I’ve done in the past.” Graham started pulling elements out of old and disparate works, and then “started breaking them up, putting them together, combining them until it became increasingly fragmented and the source material became increasingly invisible or hidden, and they kind of started looking like Cubist works.” In fact, the springboard for this series was Graham’s 2018 four-panel lightbox work, Vacuuming the Gallery 1949, which sees a dealer surrounded by Rodchenko-esque paintings. The new canvases nod to Braque, Picasso, and Fontana, making an elegant game of Modernist painting. —E.C.
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Rodney Graham, Untitled, 2020 © Rodney Graham; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.