Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
Jason Rhoades was born in Newcastle, California, in 1965, and studied at the San Francisco Institute of the Arts and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he received his MFA. Since the early 1990s his work has been exhibited at the 1995 and 1997 Whitney Biennials, the 1997 and 1999 Venice Biennials, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among many other international galleries and museums. He died in 2006 at the age of 41.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Text by Paul McCarthy, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Ralph Rugoff.
The Big Picture documents Perfect World, a 1999 installation that Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) created for the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg—an installation regarded by many as his most important project. This publication examines the work through photographs of Perfect World’s 1999 and 2000 iterations and its posthumous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in 2010, when it was shown complete for the first time.
Despite his untimely death at the age of 42, Los Angeles-based artist Jason Rhoades (1965–2007) left behind a large body of sculpture that seized the imagination of a generation of artists, curators and collectors in the 1990s. In this substantial new survey, Cologne-based independent curator Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the unfolding of Rhoades'work and provides revelatory interpretations of his large and intricate installations. Rhoades' art has its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s L.A. scene fostered by Richard Jackson and Paul McCarthy at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a time when the Southern Californian Performance scene in general had begun to open itself up to international exhibitions and the art market. Like his predecessors, Rhoades included performative elements in his installations and produced epic thematic cycles, drawing on mass culture to develop a dense weave of images and forms. This is the first comprehensive study of Rhoades' vertiginously sprawling oeuvre.