Reggie Burrows Hodges: The Reckoning

Hodges' latest series, centered around the motif of reflective surfaces.

This body of work from American painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) takes reflection as its primary focus: a handheld mirror, the glimmer of a sliding door, a glistening pool. The series has developed over the past three years and comprises the artist's first solo show in Los Angeles. Built out from Hodges' signature black ground and rendered in acrylic and pastel, the scenes and figures here emerge through gestural-but-intimate marks of incandescent hues.

Throughout the exhibition, as illustrated in this accompanying volume, mirrored surfaces multiply, operating as potent sites of transportation and slippery disappearance. The richly illustrated book, which features essays by curator Jaime DeSimone and writer and curator Hilton Als, breaks from the form of the traditional exhibition catalog to highlight the significance of this body of work as a painted world unto itself.

As Als writes, Hodges "begins each work with a flat canvas that he washes in black, a black that is the black of infinity . . . I wonder if in looking into that black sphere--into that infinite--Hodges sees his paintings; that is, maybe his imagination rests in that darkness and rather like a figure out of Cocteau, he reaches into the darkness and pulls dreams out--dreams he realizes through painting."

Reggie Burrows Hodges, born 1965 in Compton, CA, is a Maine-based painter whose works uncover universal subjects such as identity, community, truth, and memory, and often draw inspiration from his childhood in Compton. His work is held in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; and Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, among others.

Hodges is a 2020 recipient of the annual Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. As the 2019 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Hodges will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Maine in 2022.

• Publisher: ‎Karma Books, New York (April 29, 2025)
• Language: ‎English
• Paperback: ‎112 pages
• ISBN-13: ‎9781961883178
• Item Weight: ‎1.11 pounds
• Dimensions: 9.75 x 11.5 
• BISAC Categories: Art