Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of work by Jim Hodges. Since the late 1980s Hodges has created a broad range of work responding to the events, emotions, and relationships that have filled his life. These deeply affecting works engage varied forms and media, from traditional draftsmanship to more poetic approaches to sculpture and installation, to create a highly reflective vocabulary that speaks to art historical, political, and autobiographical discourses. Charting the overlooked and obvious touchstones of life with equal poignancy, his conceptual practice is as broad and expansive as the range of human experiences he captures.

For this exhibition of new work, Hodges will create new sculptures and drawings that mediate on universal themes of mortality, fragility, and the natural world. Using a variety of materials including cast glass and photographs cut to create relief, Hodges intuits form and space through a haptic approach, making tangible not just the plastic possibilities bound into various media, but also the phenomenological aspects that tie materials to lived experience. A photograph of a foliage filled landscape does not remain static, but through Hodges’ incisive intervention becomes a dynamic flurry of leaves against a monochromatic field; while a broken mirror becomes an opportunity for deeper reflection. Like the tradition of vanitas paintings, Hodges’ pieces work in concert to create a contemplative space in which sculptural process itself becomes a vehicle in which to examine both the singular and shared courses of life.

Jim Hodges was born in 1957 in Spokane Washington and received his MFA from Pratt Insitute in Brooklyn, NY. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at various venues including the Aspen Art Museum; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostello, Spain; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Currently a retrospective of his drawings across various media is on view at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, after its premiere at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. This summer it will travel to the Camden Arts Centre in London. In 2009 Hodges curated a two person exhibition “Floating a Boulder: Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Jim Hodges” at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. He currently Lives and works in New York City.