Graham Collins (Washington DC, 1980) lives and works in New York.

Graham Collins’ varied work blends painting, architecture and sculpture into a contradictory amalgam of ruin and stability. Canvases of spray painted monochrome hues or covered with fabric are partially obscured behind a scrim of tinted glass and encased in frames made with salvaged wood. The tinted monochromes combine the artist’s appreciation of normative craft forms, specifically woodworking and DIY window tinting, with the canon of abstraction. Collins forces a harmony from the disparate cultural and aesthetic values associated with these different entities. Taking a cue from Frank Stella’s dictum that “what you see is what you see”, the works function at first glance as minimalist forms, yet hold a bevy of specific information right on the surface. The weather-stained wood, the torn window tinting, the color, the shape of the stretcher, the heavy, sharp glass, a section of wall–all serve as a collection of marks that signify different histories. While pocked and torn in places, these panels still shimmer and act as a kind of mirror reflecting their surrounding environment. On closer inspection the viewer’s eyes focus back and forth on the surfaces of the glass, the canvas, the tinting – revealing what we ourselves look like when viewing an artwork.


Graham Collins uses various material approaches and substrates (ceramic, cut and quilted paintings, above ground pools) to broadly reflect on the traps, tributaries and conventions of painting as a primary vehicle for western art history. Ever-challenging the ease of viewing an artwork, Collins’ utilizes obfuscation and the viewer’s body movement as tool to experience his work.