Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Friday, November 6, of 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.