LONDON.-Canadian artist Rodney Graham (b.1949, Vancouver) defies categorisation by employing multiple styles and by working in diverse media including photography, film, performance, music and text. Wet on Wet: My Late Early Styles, his upcoming exhibition at Lisson Gallery, will present a new body of works reflecting on the practice of painting.

For Wet on Wet Graham will adopt the eccentric persona of the ‘gifted amateur’, a recurrent figure in his recent work. The works in this exhibition will encompass a variety of styles, as Graham places painting in the context of post-medium practice.

Graham credits music with informing much of his work. A musician himself, he views his role as an artist as an extension of the idea of performance. Graham’s work examines social and philosophical systems of thought, in particular those derived from the transition of the Enlightenment into Modernism. Underlying each work is an historical context, through which a complex narrative incorporates literary and philosophic references and visual puns.

Rodney Graham was born in 1949 in Vancouver, where he lives and works. Solo exhibitions include a retrospective (2004-05) that toured venues including MoCA, Los Angeles, ICA, Philadelphia and Vancouver Art Gallery; BaWAG Foundation, Vienna (2007); Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2006); Bergen Kunsthalle (2006); Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal (2006); K21, Dusseldorf (2003); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001). He has participated in international group exhibitions since the 1970s, representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and exhibiting at “documenta IX” in 1992. Graham’s work can be found in a number of public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.