JIM DINE

With the exhibition Three Ships, Jim Dine signs a spectacular return to the city of his beginnings. A native of Ohio, Jim Dine moved to New York in 1958. Since his first happenings in the 60’s and his first success as part of the Pop Art generation, Jim Dine has always maintained a close relationship with the city, where he has long kept a studio. Now working between Paris, Walla-Walla and Göttingen in Germany, he has chosen for this come back to unveil some of its most innovative new works.

Three Ships brings together the production of the past three years: monumental bronze sculptures, rows of intimate self-portraits and five massive abstract paintings on wood.

Through a clever play of scale and textures, the exhibition stages the obsessions of the artist: his taste for raw material and everyday tools, the artwork conceived as an expression of pure process, the self-portrait as a symbol of the artist’s doubts and relentless quest for beauty. The basement of the gallery, for example, creates a dialogue between rare reliefs of tools from 1967, never exhibited before, with a series of pencil drawings made since the pandemic. Both realistic and poignantly intimate, they portray the artist as an old man, lucid yet youthful. Jim Dine embraces both childhood memories – he often recounts how his first artistic emotions were forged in the family hardware store – and reminiscences of the art history with discreet homages to Roman antiquity or German expressionism.

Both raw and sophisticated, the exhibition demonstrates the vitality of an artist for whom the creative process is the very essence of the work.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Steidl publishes a 89 pages fully illustrated catalogue. Designed by the artist, it provides extensive documentation on Jim Dine’s sculptural process, as well as texts by Anne-Claudie Coric, Jim Dine and Sam Sackeroff.

Jim Dine’s work features in over 70 public collections across the world, including at the MoMA, Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Collection in London. In 2018, the Centre Pompidou organized a major retrospective of his work which then travelled to the Centre Pompidou Malaga then the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Another major retrospective was held in Rome by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2020.

In 2021, he inaugurated the Fondation GGL in Montpellier with his largest commissioned work in France: a ceramic ceiling created especially for the 17th-century manor house that is home to the foundation in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres.

In the spring 2023, Dine will inaugurate The Stardust House in Gottingen, Germany, a Pavillon dedicated to the sculpture, Thru the stardust, the heat on the lawn. This exhibition will be followed in June by the exhibition Storm of Memory at the Kunsthaus Gottingen, of new sculptures, prints and books. In the fall, Dine will participate in the exhibition, Paravents at the Prada Foundation. Later in the fall, Dine will in-augurate an exhibition of portrait drawings donated to Bowdoin College, Maine, USA.