ST. LOUIS, MO.- From Today, January 26 to April 8, 2007 the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol, an exploration of shared affinities in the work of Jim Hodges (b. 1957) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), preeminent artists of their respective generations.

This cross-generational exhibition looks at the ways in which both artists find history in everyday artifacts and use art as a means to understand visibility/invisibility, sexuality, selfhood, love and death. Objects on view range from large-scale mirror mosaics by Jim Hodges, created especially for the exhibition, to a selection of Andy Warhol drawings circa the late 1950s. Several room-size installation works are featured as well, including a re-creation of Warhol’s intoxicating Silver Clouds (1966), in which silver metallic pillows, partially filled with helium, waft through space with the assistance of oscillating fans. Altogether I Remember Heaven suggests that the work of both artists manifests ambitious agendas to craft a quintessentially American art, an impulse to reveal self without literally depicting one’s own body, and an abiding fascination with the submerged violence in American culture.

Organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, I Remember Heaven is guest curated by Susan E. Cahan, art historian, independent curator, and Des Lee Professor in Contemporary Art at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Accompanying the showing will be a fully-illustrated catalog entitled I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol. An essay by Susan Cahan will introduce the exhibition’s themes and discuss the relationship between longing and grief in the artists’ work, and another by José Esteban Muñoz, Chair of Performance Studies at New York University, will address queer aesthetics before and after Stonewall.

A highlight of I Remember Heaven, produced especially for the exhibition, is a new wallpaper work by Jim Hodges based on his delicate, lyrical drawing From This Way Through (1999). This wallpaper will provide a backdrop for a selection of Warhol drawings that embody a similar tenderness, such as a gold leaf drawing of several shoes and boots, each named for one of Warhol’s friends.

I Remember Heaven also presents several pieces that demonstrate the artists’ varied transformations of the camouflage motif. Jim Hodges’s Oh Great Terrain (2002), a mural in which the artist fragments and reconfigures a camouflage pattern into the form of a vortex, will be juxtaposed with a series of Andy Warhol’s psychedelic Camouflage prints (1987), rendered in day-glo colors. In each, systematized representations of nature have been thrown into “irrational” states, as each alludes to the pervasiveness of militarism in American culture while simultaneously celebrating nonconformity. Other juxtapositions in the exhibition show each artist addressing the reality of death and grief, as in the placing of a black silk flower curtain by Hodges entitled The End From Where You Are (1998) alongside works by Warhol from the Jackie series of 1964.

Notes Paul Ha, director of the Contemporary, “This exhibition arrives with the bang of a boomeranging time capsule, not only suggesting correspondences in the works of two influential artists, but capturing a sense of the America of the ‘60s as not so different from today: once again, an explosion of information, this time spawned in by the internet; once again, new inroads for advertising introduce an even greater onslaught of mass media images; and once again, a sanitized but unpopular war enters American homes via television, only this time designed and packaged like a mini-series.”

“The title of the show, ‘I Remember Heaven’ derives from a work by Hodges, and refers to both Hodges’s and Warhol’s persistent concern with the themes of love, beauty, and death, as well as the American tendency to idealize the past, be it the short presidency of John F. Kennedy or the gay liberation movement before the age of AIDS,” notes Cahan, exhibition curator.

The Artists
Born in Spokane, Washington in 1957, Jim Hodges received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 1986. Since the early 1990s, his work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including the São Paulo Bienal (1997), the CGAC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2005), and the Hayward Gallery in London (2005). His works are in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Andy Warhol, who coined the phrase, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” is a household name, his own fame enduring for more than 40 years. Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928 and graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. Throughout the 1950s he was a highly successful illustrator. In the early 1960s he made his first Pop paintings and sculptures, including the Campbell’s Soup series, Flower series, Brillo Boxes, Celebrity portraits, and Jackie series. One of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century, he was also a filmmaker, impresario, publisher, and socialite. He died in 1987 due to complications following surgery.