Dieu Donné announces the opening of an exhibition of new works in handmade paper by artist Jim Hodges, beginning Thursday, June 3, 2010 and running through Saturday, July 17, 2010. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, June 3, 2010 from 6–8 pm and the artist will be present.

Hodges is widely known for his investigations into materiality and painstaking shaping of materials, both everyday and exotic. In this exhibition, he submits to a material that has often captured his attention – paper. Hodges’s return to Dieu Donné is his first since his 2002 Lab Grant residency, which was the artist’s introduction to hand papermaking, during which he created drawings from richly colored paper pulp. In this recent body of work, Hodges exploits the material qualities of paper through sculpture. By cutting and folding handmade paper sheets, Hodges exposes the organic elements of the richly seductive watermarked paper.

In addition to working with the finished paper sheets, Hodges also sculpted pulp in the wet process, which allowed him to “access the paper in its unborn state.” By pulling out pieces of wet pulp by hand and applying lines with pigmented pulp, Hodges revisits his practice of reduction and addition in an entirely new way. The resulting works illustrate both beauty and decay, and through this manipulation of paper in its most raw state the artist achieves haunting and emotive results.

Jim Hodges (b. 1957, Spokane, Washington) lives and works in New York City. This exhibition at Dieu Donné follows the artist’s October 2009 solo exhibition “Love, Etc,” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which traveled to the Fondazione Bevilacqua in Venice, and will be at the Camden Arts Center in London in June of 2010. The artist is represented by Barbara Gladstone Gallery, who presented his recent work in Brussels in March 2010. Hodges work is featured in permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Guggenheim Museu, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. and the Tate in London, among others.