Jimmie is back!

(Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Michel Rein)

With the opening of a new branch by Michel Rein of Paris, Brussels has yet another new gallery. (How many does that make? We’ve lost count.) Jimmie Durham, who was the subject of a fine retrospective last year at the M HKA, is the first artist on show there. Durham is of Cherokee origin and his work often refers to that fact. He often works in stone and other inanimate material that is occasionally given an animist interpretation. One of his best-known works is a video entitled Stoning the Refrigerator, in which he throws stones at a fridge until it is covered in dents. The work can be interpreted as a rejection of technology, although the artist prefers to describe it as a sculptural process at the end of which the fridge has different dimensions. A born nomad, Durham decided to leave the United States for political reasons. His wanderings have taken him to Brussels before: he lived for a while in Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles. At his exhibition in the Michel Rein gallery, he presents a brand-new assemblage sculpture in which he has incorporated a tube he found in Brussels. “You could almost describe it as a welcome gift to our gallery and our Belgian customers,” says Rein with a laugh. Into the yellow tube, which rests on wooden trestles, a block of wood, painted in flesh tones, has been stuffed – giving the assemblage a kind of human touch. In another work Durham offers us a sculpture with a TV dish – something not exactly unknown in the streets of Brussels – to which he has attached a little branch, highlighting once more the contrast between nature and culture. In a series of absurd graphics and diagrams, he makes fun of our urge to rationalise. The exhibition is rounded off by three drawings produced by a procedure that recalls the video mentioned above: the artist places a piece of charcoal on paper and then smashes it with a large stone, thereby producing a drawing. “Works of Science and Yellowness” is perhaps not the ideal exhibition for people who are unfamiliar with Durham’s work, but it is an exhibition that fits in perfectly with the rest of his oeuvre.

JIMMIE DURHAM: WORKS OF SCIENCE AND YELLOWNESS > 7/12, di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 10 > 18.00, gratis/gratuit/free, Galerie Michel Rein, rue Washingtonstraat 51A, Elsene/Ixelles, 02-640.26.40, www.michelrein.com