American artist Jim Hodges is known for his singular ability to infuse emotion and narrative into the objects of our daily lives, creating poignant studies on ideas such as temporality, life, and love. This is the first comprehensive survey to be organized in the United States on the work of the New York–based artist. Featuring some 75 pieces produced from 1987 through the present, Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take brings together photography, drawing, works on paper, and objects rendered in mirror, lightbulbs, silk flowers, and glass alongside several major room-size installations.
Since the late 1980s, Hodges’ poetic reconsiderations of the material world have inspired a wide-ranging body of work. From the delicate nature of early wall sculptures—including Diary of Flowers (1994), composed with hundreds of doodled paper napkins, and Changing Things (1997), made from disassembled silk flowers pinned to the wall—to the large cut-paper photographs of flowering trees, gold-leafed newspaper pages, and light-filled mirror mosaics of the past decade, Hodges’ art typically begins as humble, even overlooked materials that are transformed through his touch. These acts of subtle transmutation, which have a relationship to sculpture as well as drawing, elevate his pieces to other levels of interpretation and meaning.
A major and highly visible new work on the Walker campus, Hodges’ Untitled (2011) was commissioned in 2012 in conjunction with the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s 25th anniversary. A shimmering presence on the grassy hillside, the sculpture is comprised of four 400-million-year-old boulders clad in vibrantly hued polished steel that generates an entrancing play of light and color, weight and buoyancy.
A major catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Curators: Olga Viso, Executive Director, Walker Art Center; Jeffrey Grove, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art
Exhibition Tour Schedule
- Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (October 6, 2013–January 12, 2014)
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (February 15–May 11, 2014)
- Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (June 5–September 1, 2014)
- UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (October 5, 2014–January 17, 2015)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)