Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present turning pages in the book of love, the first exhibition by the artist Jim Hodges with our gallery, conceived and created for the historically significant Palazzo Belgioioso in Milan.

Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters a subtle atmosphere of light and shadows. A room within a room hosts a cabinet made of wood and its multiple skins of lacquer, gold, and silk, housing an object made of light and glass. In the second room a sculpture of two interlaced arms made in white Michelangelo marble lay upon a rock made of black Colonnata marble as they hold a rose made of gold. Behind the marble sculpture is a large scale diptych, that is part of one of Jim Hodges’ new series of paintings created with glitter and other mediums, evokes the artist’s interest in the process of creating through gesture and immediacy. In the 18th century antique library reading room of Palazzo Belgioioso, the viewer encounters a precious object held by two intertwined hands - solemn and charmed, immersed in a red velvet tent. In the garden of the palazzo, used for an exhibition for the first time, the artist has positioned a transformed root of a giant redwood into a deconstructed gilded bronze sculpture.

Since the late 1980’s Jim Hodges has employed a broad range of everyday and precious materials to create works that transform the quotidian object into a site where the personal, political, and universal merge through simple gesture and poetic command. Taking up varied modes of process and production, Hodges' practice resists the definitional aims of discourse, instead offering multilayered works that evoke resonant themes such as identity and mortality. Glitter, bronze, fabric, gold, marble, glass and other materials have become part of the construction of a narrative on fragility, ephemerality, love and loss.

turning pages in the book of love is Jim Hodges’ first exhibition in Milan.