We recall the retrospective exhibition held at MACBA in 2010 on the work of Rodney Graham, one of the main exponents of Conceptual art and a key artist in the MACBA Collection. Through the Forest acts as a common thread tracing the entire career of this Canadian artist, a recurring theme in the life and artistic proposals of someone who, as he himself said, always felt nervous when nature had no purpose. As Julian Heynen explains in the exhibition catalogue: ‘Rodney Graham’s books, sculptures, photographs, films, objects, paintings, and music; his artistic involvements with Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Donald Judd, Richard Wagner, the Brothers Grimm, and Pablo Picasso; his practice of borrowing from, referencing, turning upside down, and adapting other works and authors; his constant oscillating between quotation and autobiography […] Despite all his different disguises, he remains palpably present in the work, so much so that one cannot get rid of the suspicion that this is a person trying to construct a kind of self-portrait.’ You can listen to Graham’s own statements in an interview with Radio Web MACBA from February 2010:

Son[i]a #96.
04.02.2010

DISCOVER THE EXHIBITION