Press Release

Jimmie Durham

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to feature new mixed-media work by Jimmie Durham. Recent exhibitions of this poet, writer, performance artist, lecturer and sculptor have included solo shows at the ICA, London and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels as well as participation in “Cocido y Crudo” at the Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Faret Tachikawa Project, Tokyo.

In this, his second solo show at the gallery, Durham continues his exploration of the work art does by investigating what is visual about the visual arts. Through combing various sizes of clothing with dirt, hair, sand, paint, plaster, and glue, he fashions strikingly un-ordinary objects, objects which start us thinking about how surfaces function and what constitutes an art object per se. The “clothingness” of an everyday garment fades as its textures and shapes are revealed as rich aesthetic surfaces. A bucket of petrified dirty clothes refuses to be read as straight illustration, poetically challenging that characteristic response to the visual. As with all of Durham’s work, these pieces are intellectually and visually complex, problematizing canonical norms of the art world by both their process and their presence.

Press Release

Janus and His Double

NICOLE KLAGSBRUN GALLERY is pleased to present an installation by JIMMIE DURHAM. The works will be on display from November 7 through December 5, 1992. Mr. Durham is “an artist whose work takes form as performance and poetry as well as sculpture and works on paper. He was recently included in Documenta IX in Kassel Germany and he has been invited to the Whitney Biennial this spring.

The current installation, entitled “Janus and His Double”, sets up a context in which opposites are examined. The gallery is dived into halves one of which contains ‘non-art’ by the Shakespearean character Caliban who attempts to explore his own identity by making drawings and paintings of his nose. IN the other half the installation contains ‘real art’ in a display of works on paper and sculptures of PVC and mud. At the centre, in a kind of twilight zone between the two halves, stands the figure of Janus regarding the whole.