Dan Graham

Biography

Since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video and television are among the focuses of his provocative investigations, which are articulated in essays, performances, installations, videotapes and architectural/sculptural designs.

Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and performance works that actively engage the viewer in a perceptual and psychological inquiry into public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. Restructuring space, time and spectatorship in a deconstruction of the phenomenology of viewing, his early installations often incorporate closed-circuit video systems within architectural spaces. The viewer's perception is manipulated and displaced through such devices as time delay, projections, surveillance and mirrors.

In installations focusing on the social implications of television, as articulated in private and public viewing spaces, Graham refers to video's semiotic function in architecture in relation to both window and mirror. Graham has also published numerous critical and theoretical essays that investigate the cultural ideology of such contemporary social phenomena as punk music, suburbia and public architecture.

Graham was born in 1942. He has published numerous critical essays, and is the author of Video-Architecture-Television (1980). His work is represented in the collections of numerous major institutions in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Collection, London; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing; Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Greene Naftali, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Le Consortium, Dijon; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Castello di Rivoli, Museo d' Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and in 2018 had a show entitled: Dan Graham: Dan’s World at Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been represented internationally in group exhibitions at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; P.S. 1, New York; Marion Goodman Gallery, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other institutions.

In 2009, Graham was honored with the first North American retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Following its presentation at MOCA, Dan Graham: Beyond traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and then to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He was commissioned by the MET in 2014 to create a piece for the museum's Roof Garden.

Graham lived and worked in New York until his death in 2022.