Project Room : Dan Graham
March 21 - April 8, 2023
303 Gallery
Just over one year ago, we lost a visionary artist and dear friend in Dan Graham.
The artist will be honored in a Memorial to be held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York at the end of March. 303 Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, 3A Gallery and Printed Matter are honored to present works by Graham across their New York City spaces to coincide with the memorial, paying tribute to a figure whose legacy extends beyond his art making and will continue to be felt by the many who encountered Graham while he was alive.
303 Gallery invited David Platzker to curate a concise history of Dan Graham’s earliest Projects for Publication produced between 1966 and 1981. In these works Graham is a poet, music critic, cultural theorist, and artist engaged in bridging the gulf between artistic output and an artist actively seeking populist venues for placement for his works. Those sites of engagement include the magazines
Harpers’s Bazaar, Extensions, Art-Language, New York Review of Sex & Politics, Screw, Fusion, and other periodicals.
On view alongside these works will be Dan Graham’s
Neo-Baroque Walkway, 2020. Graham's model allows the viewer to become both participant and spectator in perceiving the space physically and psychologically in relation to other spectators.
Despite his disavowal of Conceptual Art as a term, Dan Graham was one of its earliest pioneers through early text-based works, typographic wall pieces and schematic poems, not to mention the seminal illustrated magazine essay, Homes for America (1966). He exhibited the work of his peers Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson at the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he was briefly the curator and director, before showing alongside these and many other Minimalists and Conceptualists during the 1960s and 70s.
The main focus of Graham’s art since the late 1970s was an ongoing series of public architectural installations, which he called pavilions, derived from geometric forms and rendered in plate glass, two-way mirror, and steel armatures. Graham intended his pavilions to function as punctuation marks, pausing or altering the experience of physical space, providing momentary diversion for romance or play, or else as places to delve into other activities, like reading or viewing videos. These deceptively simple structures recall many of the artist’s earlier experiments with perception, reflection, and refraction, but depart from them in their non-gallery setting as long-term additions to the landscape. Graham had an encyclopedic sphere of references and wrote about everything from Dean Martin and rock music to astrology and urban architecture.
303 Gallery is located at 555 West 21 Street, New York, NY 10011. For more information please visit 303 Gallery's website
303GALLERY.com.
