The Centre Pompidou is the first major European institution to put on a solo show of work by American contemporary artist, Jim Hodges. Sixty of his major works are exhibited, which illustrate the recurring themes of his thirty-year career, such as fragility, temporality, love and death. The exhibition sketches out an overview of the artist’s work since the beginning of his career which began in 1980. Although drawing is omnipresent in his radical and original works, his use of uncommon materials can be as extravagant as 24 carat gold leaf, to artificial flowers, his own saliva and adhesive tape. Evoking nature, literature and spirituality, his works are a fusion of simple materials with fastidious techniques of drawing, sewing, collage, decoupage and assemblage.

 

 

The exhibition is wrapped by exterior walls covered in camouflage pattern, which acts as an indicator to the artist’s exploration of the human relationship to nature. The main themes of his work are explored through nature and beauty. This ‘prettiness’ which qualifies his work is reinforced by the use of dainty, often natural, materials which reflect the fragility of nature and thus that of life. This is apparent in most of his works, such as A Line to you which consists of a fragile rope made of artificial flowers reaching up from the floor to the ceiling. Flower symbolism is extremely present in the artist’s work and is, to a certain extent, inspired by works of French author, Jean Genet. Hodges also illustrates the beauty of life in relation to its temporality constraint. His mirrors smashed in the shape of flowers paint a picture of sickness and death in their distorted reflections.

His metal chain spider webs, particularly enigmatic of his work, are also indicators of the notion of physical constraints on life. On par with beauty, love is as important in Hodges’ work. The four letter word often surfaces; his watercolour painting of the four-letter word, Chained for example, wrapped in a thin spindly intricate cobweb further reinforces the overlap between beauty and constraint.

Through the artist’s pinned flowers, chain webs, drawings and shards of mirrors, the Centre Pompidou opens the door to Jim Hodges’ distinct vision of reality; one marked by beauty and joy as well as by sickness and death which demonstrates the ephemeral beauty in the fragility of life.