Calling someone's art "unclassifiable" is one of those things critics love to do, but in the case of Canadian artist Rodney Graham it's actually true. In attempting to define Graham's body of work, words like cerebral, referential and multidisciplinary come to mind. So do witty, clever and inventive. Graham's fascination with perception, popular culture, history and technology are evident throughout his work, particularly in his installations involving obsolete (or soon to be obsolete) machinery. For example, in Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) a "typewriter and film projector face off against one another with the latter projecting a film of the former". But aging or defunct technology are not the only protagonists of Graham's art. The diversity of his choice of media is well-known: books, found texts, video, sculpture, mechanical devices, optical toys, camara obscura, printed media, musical texts, painting, photography...Graham's exploration of our social and artistic past and present refers to everything from pop music, art history, philosophy and literature to individuals like Freud, Picasso, Poe, Büchner, Donald Judd or Jeff Wall (with whom he was in a band, UJ3RK5, in the 1970s). Graham is currently working on a series of film installations with director Harun Farocki entitled HF/RG. The retrospective Through the Woods at MACBA covers his work from 1978 to 2008 and is presented in collaboration with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The Picasso Museum is also participating in the exhibition with a selection of Graham's paintings (a medium he only started working in recently) from a series called Picasso, My Master, a humorous tribute to the legendary artist.

Until May 18th

MACBA

Plaça dels Àngels 1, 08001 Barcelona

Image: Possible Abstractions by Rodney Graham