Jimmy Raskin's Curio Shop

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Jimmy Raskin's Curio Shop, his sixth one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Jimmy Raskin was a poet. At the age of nineteen, however, Raskin stopped writing poetry to devote himself to exploring and manifesting the conditions under which what he calls ‘the Poem' might remain an achievable aim in our current cultural conditions. Toward this end, Raskin has developed a theatrical, multimedia universe, fluidly combining writing with paintings, drawings, and sculptures, along with the production of props for lecture-performances. Collages typically appear alongside videos, cartoons, and diagrams of what he has determined to be the essential existential problems confronting the central figure of the ‘Poet Pure.' Since 1989, a diverse body of work has emerged, marked by remarkably consistent subject matter and a restricted set of visual motifs, all in the service of Raskin's mysteriously pedagogical aims. His illustrational project articulates a dualistic cosmology—a grandiose effort that attempts to capture and affirm the fundamental opposition between, on the one hand, the ‘Spirit of the restless Poet' under the expressive mode of ‘Inseparability' and, on the other, ‘Critical Distance' under the mode of ‘Simultaneity,' or what he calls ‘Infinite Juxtaposition' and the figure of the ‘Documentarian.'

Ultimately, modes of expression themselves are Raskin's medium. If the mode of the Poet is rigorously distinguished from the mode of the Critic, it is because the artist has been fundamentally attracted to their potential yet uneasy fusion. Raskin has had deep insight into the dangers of one mode killing the other, which is perhaps why his work has so arduously separated the two. He shows us with clarity and persistence, however, that any work of art worthy of the name, any potential Poem, must stage one and the other.

Jimmy Raskin (b. 1970, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. A graduate of CalArts, Raskin has exhibited his work and staged 'lecture-performances' in institutions, art galleries and other non-traditional gathering spaces internationally since the mid-1990s, notably at MoMA PS1, Thread Waxing Place, Greene Naftali, Cooper Union, Miguel Abreu Gallery, and SculptureCenter (all in New York), as well as Centre Pompidou and The Swiss Institute, Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Real Art Ways, Hartford; and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach. In 2013, Raskin participated in Performa 13 as part of Performa After Hours, which marked his second contribution to the performance biennial, following A Certain Misgiving in the Disciple (2009). His work was included in For the blind man in the dark looking for the black cat that isn't there (2010), a major group exhibition organized by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; the ICA, London; de Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam; and Culturgest, Lisbon. Raskin participated in Breaking New Ground Underground, curated by Thea Westreich at Stonescape, Napa Valley, California. Raskin's fifth one-person exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Cliché Garden, was held in 2024. Publications include The Prologue, The Poltergeist & The Hollow Tree (Foundation 20 21, 2005), The Lisbon Lecture (Sequence Press, 2012), Corner Jump (Onestar Press, 2012), and The Final Eternal Return (2019), released as part of the group exhibition Tribe-Specific at Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna.