Grazer Kunstverein

• Exhibition

4/24/2026 - 5/31/2026

House | Drake Carr

In the Netherlands, it is a longstanding tradition to appoint a stadsdichter: a poet immersed in the civic life of a city for a full year, tasked with writing about it as it happens. Not just the inaugurations and official speeches, but also the broken escalators, overheard gossip, gray Tuesdays, the hiccups, and sudden flashes of beauty. For our 40th anniversary, we will attempt something similar.

Enter Drake Carr, an artist whose work observes how social worlds, places, and moments can be captured, recorded, and translated into drawing. For his first institutional exhibition in Europe, titled House, he takes up residence at the Grazer Kunstverein, bringing his ongoing practice of portraiture into the institution’s orbit. For six consecutive weeks, Carr invites artists, team members, new acquaintances, and visitors—the changing cast of members through which the institution forms itself—to sit for him, in an effort to create a portrait of the institution.

The image that will emerge will not be neutral, nor will it be complete. Portraiture always involves a certain surrender of control. This is precisely the point. What we will get to see is the Grazer Kunstverein refracted through Carr’s attentive eye to the interpersonal. A snapshot.

In order to facilitate these portraits, Carr has constructed a series of elaborate interior sets within the gallery. These environments are designed to evoke a sense of domestic space, places of comfort and self-expression, while also functioning as stages for the encounters that take place within them. There is something faintly Camp in this attention to décor and staging. In this, he follows in the footsteps of artists such as Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Jean Cocteau—or, closer to home, the ornamental intelligence of Dagobert Peche. Like in other projects, here again, Carr collaborates with his mother, Wendy Carr, who runs an interior design studio based in her home, where Drake grew up. When your home is on display, every room is a stage. Of course, exhibition spaces too can trigger a similar kind of self-awareness. Carr’s sets in Graz, somewhat counter this: they provide a framework that eases the discomfort of sitting for a portrait in public, while also heightening the drama of the act.

In these playful environments, the Kunstverein is caught in the act of being itself—slightly overdressed, beautifully lit, a little self-aware, and entirely alive.

• Artists:
• Drake Carr
• Drake Carr was born in 1993 in Flint, MI, and currently lives and works in New York City, NY. The artist received a BA in Graphic Design from Eastern Michigan University in 2015. Attuned to the diverse contexts in which he creates, Carr employs drawing, painting, and collage, approaching his practice with a versatility that encompasses commissioned portraits drawn in the intimate settings of subjects’ homes, paintings that oscillate between fine art and decoration in the gritty and communal atmosphere of a Bushwick dive bar, and immersive live drawing residencies spanning multiple weeks. Inspired by the fashion illustrators of the 1970s and ’80s like Antonio Lopez, he works with his subjects to style and pose them in dynamic ways. In all of his work, Carr paints a portrait of the communities he moves through that is simultaneously humorous and earnest, exaggerated and true-to-life.