A greying man sits glumly in the oak-lined booth of a bohemian bar nursing a pint. Above the velvet-cushioned bench on which he hunches is a salon hang of cubist paintings – works in the style of Picasso, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall. The man is the artist Rodney Graham, who has died aged 73 after suffering from cancer, or at least Graham playing one of the many characters featured in his long-running series of meticulously constructed photographic portraits.
Artist in Artist Bar, 1950s (2016), the cinematic photograph reproduced as a lightbox, has all the hallmarks of the Canadian’s work: steeped in artistic and literary references, rich in humour, and produced with an extraordinary amount of effort. Graham spent six months painting each of the works in the pub scene, carefully honing their 20th-century style.
