Jimmy Merris, Die Hoffnung

16th April – 21st May 2016
PV Friday 15th April 6pm

“As a child he crawls under the table when his parents are not at home, by this brilliantly simple trick the living room is turned into a place of adventure. As a growing boy he hankers after a watch of his own. And then, as a young man with a gold watch, he longs for the woman to go with it. As a mature man with watch and wife he hankers after a prominent position. When he has successfully attained the fulfilment of this little circle of wishes and is calmly swinging to and fro in it like a pendulum, it nevertheless seems that his store of unsatisfied dreams has not diminished by one jot. For when he wants to rise above the rut of the everyday he will resort to metaphor and simile. Obviously because snow is at times disagreeable to him, he compares it to women’s glimmering breasts. As soon as his wife’s breasts begin to bore him he compares them to glimmering snow. He would be horrified if one day his ‘little turtle-dove’ suddenly had horny bills to coo with, or if her lips really turned into coral, but poetically he finds it stimulating. He is capable of turning everything into anything – snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow. For all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not…” ^[1]

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Jimmy Merris (b. 1983) lives and works in North Wales. Recent solo exhibitions include Life Eh Tut at SWG3, Glasgow, Julie og Jimmy go dogging, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, (with Julie Verhoeven), 2014, London, Bloomberg SPACE, London, 2013 (curated by Paul Pieroni) and Deep Joy on Home Soil, Studio Voltaire, London, 2012. Group Shows include Awesome Tapes From Africa Mate, Bold Tendencies, London, 2013, Yes I Will Yes, American Contemporary, New York, 2013 and Young London, V22, London, 2012.

^{^[1]} Robert Musil Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften. Book 1 (1930)