WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announces the acquisition and long-term installation of celebrated artist Jimmie Durham’s large-scale sculpture “Still Life With Spirit and Xitle.” Regarded as one of Durham’s most significant works, “Still Life With Spirit and Xitle” made its institutional debut beginning Aug. 6, prominently situated in front of the museum’s main entrance.
Durham’s “Still Life With Spirit and Xitle” is a slapstick disaster scene first enacted by the artist in Mexico City in 2007. The title and material reference the ancient eruption of the nearby volcano Xitle, where an outflow of lava destroyed the archaic city of Cuicuilco. The work’s red-basalt boulder was quarried from the archaeological site and dropped by crane upon the roof of a 1992 Chrysler Spirit. As a finishing touch, Durham painted the boulder with a smug, cartoon-like face.
In works that are part performance, part sculpture, Durham uses humor and irreverence to arrive at probing insights. For many years, his work has explored the complexities of stone—and both its physical and metaphoric meanings—loading otherwise comic gestures with complex gravity. Durham has used stones to smash glass vitrines in galleries, exhibited found stones imbued with mystic significance, bombarded household appliances with rocks, sunk a river barge with a single, enormous piece of granite and—more recently—dropped boulders on two automobiles and one small aircraft.
“I have long admired the work of Jimmie Durham and am delighted that visitors to the Hirshhorn will have the unique opportunity to experience one of his most iconic sculptures on view on our plaza this summer,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “‘Still Life With Spirit and Xitle’ will serve to facilitate an interesting dialogue with other popular works in our outdoor sculpture garden, including by modern masters such as Jannis Kounnellis, Sergio Camargo and Isamu Noguchi, all of whom engaged in a postmodern contemplation of stone as a primary medium.”
In 2017, Durham will have his first North American retrospective, opening at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in January, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in June and culminating at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in November.
Durham was born in Washington, Ark., in 1940, but has spent much of his life outside the United States. After working as a political organizer for the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, before ultimately relocating to Europe in 1994. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe at venues such as the Serpentine Gallery in London (2015), MuHKA in Antwerp (2012), the Glasgow International Festival (2010), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009), the Kunstverein Munich (1998) and the Wittgenstein Haus in Vienna (1996). Durham has participated in the Venice Biennale five times and in multiple iterations of documenta, an exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, and the Whitney Biennial. His work is in public collections throughout Europe, including in France at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, FRAC Villeurbanne, FRAC Marseilles, FRAC Rheims, FRAC Pays-de-la-Loire and Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes; MuHKA in Antwerp, Belgium; and MUSAC in Leon, Spain.
