Jim Hodges: Love, etc. / Centre Pompidou, Paris / Interview

Currently, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, is showing works by the American artist Jim Hodges, titled Jim Hodges: Love, etc. It’s the first personal exhibition devoted to Jim Hodges by a major European institution. On display are around sixty of his works, offering a panorama of the unique world of this artist.

On occasion of his solo show at the Centre Pompidou, Christophe Ecoffet spoke with Jim Hodges about his work.

Jim Hodges was born in 1957 in Washington State. In his work, Jim Hodges deals with fragility, temporality, love and death by employing and being inspired by the vocabulary of nature.

“His very contrasting work can be minimalist, reflected in the sobriety of some of his pieces, but it can also be Baroque, reflected in the exuberance of his work, the richness of the materials used and the stunning, iridescent colours that he employs. The artist explores modest materials like paper, fabric flowers and pastilles of colour, as much as more sophisticated materials like gold leaf. His works, influenced by nature and literature, but also by spirituality, combine these materials with the meticulous precision of collage work, sewing, assembling and cutting out.

Whether it is fine cobwebs made of silver chain, cut-up photographs, assembly of musical partitions, pinned flowers or broken mirrors which describe another image of reality, through his work Hodges expresses his original vision of a world marked as much by beauty and joie de vivre as by illness and death.” (Excerpt from the press release).

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