Centre Pompidou welcomes the American artist Jim Hodges for his first solo exhibition in a major European institution. Well-known on the American art scene, this uncommon artist will be showing about sixty of his works in the Galerie d’art graphique of the Musée national d’art moderne, in what amounts to a panorama of his work and its singular universe.

Hodges, who was born in 1957 in the State of Washington, has been creating since the 1980s a corpus of work both radical and original, in which drawing is omnipresent.

In it, he takes up themes of fragility, temporality, love and death, drawing inspiration from the vocabulary of nature and using it to produce artworks of extreme beauty and simplicity.  Hodges’s output is marked by extensive contrast. It can be minimalist in its sobriety or baroque in its exuberance, its use of rich materials and sumptuous, shimmering colours. He is just as likely to use humble materials, like paper, colour paste-ons and artificial flowers as precious materials such as gold leaf. Drawing on nature, literature and spirituality, his work often marries the simplicity of materials with meticulous, precise techniques of collage, sewing, assemblage and decoupage.

Be it in his thin silver chain webs, his cut-out photos, his collages of musical scores and pinned flowers, or his broken mirrors that produce a different picture of reality, the artist invariably evinces his unique vision of a world characterized as much by beauty and joie de vivre as by sickness and death.

A catalogue, edited by Jonas Storsve, exhibition curator, will be published by Éditions du Centre Pompidou