'Not Post-Modernism. Dan Graham and 20th-Century Architecture' at Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal

1 November 2023

The exhibition 'Not Post-Modernism. Dan Graham and 20th-Century Architecture' was conceived by Dan Graham, and is the last exhibition he had the opportunity to work on before he passed away in 2022. The presentation takes form as a moving and rigorous tribute to an artist, thinker, and writer for whom architecture and the way we collectively inhabit it was the core value of his work.

Dan Graham’s multifaceted and extensive practice since the mid-1960s has made him an unclassifiable protagonist of contemporary art. Including critical writing, poetry, performance, sculpture, media installations, films and videos as well as photography, his œuvre addresses both the new conditions of spectatorship and subjectivity developed after Minimal and Conceptual Art as well as the blurring of strict and stable frontiers between the traditions of the fine arts (high culture) and the products of popular subcultures (the vernacular contemporary).

The exhibition expresses Graham’s admiration for eight architects that were, in one way or the other, influential on his work: Jan Duiker, Lina Bo Bardi, Atelier Bow-Wow, Sverre Fehn, Itsuko Hasegawa, Kazuo Shinohara, Anne Tyng, and Vilanova Artigas. Selected by Graham, the projects are carefully brought into exhibition form by Atelier Bow-Wow and organised in a “critical space” in which their presentation in pairs allows creative readings and a dynamic evolution of ideas and forms. The exhibition also functions as an essay on architecture – a discipline that Graham made the artworld to be conscious of, making it aware of its relevance and critical of its contents.

The exhibition is organised by Fundação de Serralves, curated by Dan Graham and Bartomeu Marí.