Main: Jimmie Durham / Humanity Is Not a Completed Project, Museo Madre / Bio: Jimmie Durham, Self-Portrait Pretending to Be Euroman, 2008. Courtesy collezione privata e Christine König, Vienna

Artist, poet, performer, essayist, activist: Jimmie Durham (1940–2021) is a unique figure in the international art history of the last half century. His work addresses the foundations of European and North American culture, deconstructing received ideas and accepted categories. This first retrospective exhibition after his death in late 2021 features over 150 works, some never previously exhibited. It creates links across time periods within thematic sequences, combining elements of chronology with a narrative approach and including references to the artist’s experiments with spatial strategies in key historical exhibitions. Across a career spanning more than fifty years, Durham dedicated his practice to the critical decoding of the naturalized images and symbols that underpin dominant cultural systems. His works, marked by a strong vein of humor, range from sculptures to videos, poems, performances, installations, paintings, drawings, collages, prints and essays. Constructing ‘illegal combinations with rejected objects’, across natural and industrial materials, Durham generated ruptures within conventions of language and knowledge.

[Museo Madre]