Artists

Jimmie Durham

Press release

This year we are celebrating the artist and writer Jimmie Durham (1940–2021) with a solo exhibition on the theme of art and scientific thinking. The title of the exhibition is a quote from Durham: “Art and science are the same thing.” We are showing major works from the 1980s to the 2010s such as The Aharonov-Bohm Effect (1989), Heisenberg’s Principle (1989), Various Shapes and Materials (2009), and the wall installation Electric (1995), as well as drawings.

The idea for this exhibition, which Jimmie Durham conceived together with Barbara Wien during his lifetime, came about while working on Durham’s poetry collection Particle/Word Theory, published in 2020 by Wiens Verlag, Berlin and Edition Hansjörg Mayer, London. In this book, Durham cites studies and articles from natural science publications such as nature, he writes about brain research and new findings in pain therapies. Questions and discoveries from biology, geology, archaeology, and quantum mechanics serve as important points of referencethat Durham develops artistically in his works. For Durham, scientific thinking was never separate from his work as an artist. In a conversation with Dirk Snauwaert, Durham said: “I don’t want art to be separated from other parts of life, and I also don’t want science to be separated from other parts of life.”