Curated by Melanie Ohnemus

For the past fifteen years, Jimmie Durham has been throwing stones. And while his physical targets have ranged from shopwindows, TV sets, and refrigerators to boats, automobiles, and airplanes, what he’s really been aiming at are the complex questions around cultural identity, the relation of violence to political power, and the latent poetry and meaning that wait to be extracted (sometimes forcibly) from superficially banal objects. The act is a simple, resonant, often disarmingly funny one, and it fits Durham’s larger conceptual program perfectly. One hopes his show at Portikus—coming as it does on the heels of the American-born artist’s 2009 exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (his second European survey in as many years)—will at last awaken curatorial decision makers in the US to the considerable achievements of this brilliant, exiled native son.

— Jeffery Kastner