Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Jim Hodges, which will be mounted across both gallery spaces in Chelsea and marks the artist’s first project at the gallery’s New York locations. For over two decades, Hodges has employed a broad range of everyday and precious materials to create works that transform the quotidian object into a site where the personal, political, and universal merge through simple gesture and poetic command. Taking up varied modes of process and production, Hodges’ practice resists the definitional aims of discourse, instead offering multilayered works that evoke resonant themes such as identity, loss, mortality, and love.
In this two-part exhibition, Hodges presents several new large-scale sculptural works that investigate notions of time, movement, color, and reflection. Furthering his frequent use of manipulated mirrored elements, Hodges will exhibit his largest black-mirrored sculpture to date, creating a contemplative yet fractured zone for reflection and refraction. A room-sized installation, inspired by the artist’s recent trip to India, demonstrates a heightened focus on color, saturation, and performance. Merging the real with the imagined, a monumental grouping of sculptures seamlessly juxtaposes dense organic forms with interventions of synthetic beauty. Moving between disparate media and contrasting forms, Hodges embeds each with a charged sense of its own making and a multitude of metaphoric possibilities.
While these new sculptures mark a significant departure from the ephemeral quality and intimate scale of Hodges’s previous work, they emphasize the artist’s ongoing interest in a spectrum of materiality and the liminal space between beauty and loss. Underscoring Hodges’ commitment to linking material with lived experience, several of the works on view will evolve temporally and materially over the course of the exhibition. Various performances will take place, during which other forms of artistic expression– including dance and textual reading– will respond to and interact with the sculptural works on view. Drawing upon the collaborative nature and communal foundation of these works, Hodges creates a dynamic environment where color becomes form and movement generates action.
Jim Hodges was born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including: the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Camden Art Centre, London; the Aspen Art Museum; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Hodges was recently appointed to serve as the Acting Director of the Graduate Sculpture Department at the Yale University School of Art for the 2011/2012 academic year. His film Untitled, 2010, will be distributed by Visual AIDS on December 1, 2011 in conjunction with World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art. A major retrospective of Hodges’ work, organized by the Walker Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, is scheduled for 2013/2014. Hodges currently lives and works in New York City.
