LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum presents Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take, the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work organized in the United States. On view October 3, 2014 – January 18, 2015, the exhibition explores the trajectory of the artist’s twenty-five-year career, highlighting major themes that unify his multilayered and varied practice. Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take features some 75 pieces produced from 1987 through the present, bringing together photography, drawing, works on paper, and work created with mirror, light bulbs, silk flowers, and glass alongside several major room-size installations. Co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the exhibition is curated by Olga Viso, executive director, Walker Art Center and Jeffrey Grove, former senior curator of special projects & research, Dallas Museum of Art. The West Coast debut at the Hammer is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, with Aram Moshayedi, curator. The installation has been re-conceptualized specifically for the Hammer by the artist with artists Julie Ault and Martin Beck.

"Jim is one of the most important artists to emerge from the early 1990s and part of a generation whose practice was both poetic and personal yet also deeply political. His beautiful work Give More Than you Take, owned by the Hammer, signals this connection to the world,” remarks Hammer director Ann Philbin. “For the Hammer installation, the last venue of the Hodges tour, Jim is making a new narrative for the works and engaging with our spaces, light and architecture. We look forward to a beautiful and engaging exhibition."

An artist who draws on the vernacular and politics of the everyday, finding meaning and poetics in repurposed materials, Hodges infuses emotion and narrative into the objects of our daily lives. Creating works in a range of media Hodges addresses big ideas such as memory and loss, love, the passage of time, and the threshold between light and dark. Since the late 1980s, his reconsiderations of the material world have generated a discursive and generous body of work. From the ephemeral nature of early wall works—including Diary of Flowers (1994), composed of hundreds of doodled paper napkins, and Changing Things (1997), made from disassembled silk flowers pinned to the wall—to the large cut-paper photographs of flowering trees, gold-leafed newspaper pages, and light-filled mirror mosaics of the past decade, Hodges’ art typically begins with humble, even overlooked materials that are transformed through his practice of both subtle alteration and transformation of form. More recently the artist has extracted text from sources ranging from every day speech, including the title of this exhibition, to the Constitution in a recent public work made by the artist. These acts of subtle transmutation, which occur through sculpture as well as drawing, expand his works and open multiple avenues of interpretation and meaning encouraging the viewer to engage and question their relationship to the world around them.

Born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington, Hodges received a BFA from Fort Wright College in Spokane and an MFA from the Pratt Institute. He has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and in Europe, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Hodges’ work is included in the collections of notable institutions, among them the Dallas Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fonds Régional des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Hammer Museum. He lives and works in New York City.