Jim Dine
Jim Dine, The Classic Prints
For his return to Galerie Templon’s Brussels space after six years, Jim Dine, one of the most significant American artists of his generation, is presenting a retrospective look at his print work, an art that he has become recognized over the years as one of the greatest masters.
The question of the multiple is secondary to him, as he retouches many of his prints by hand. “I don’t care about making editions. If there was just one of each images, I’d be happy. The thrill for me is inventing, and adding or taking out, changing from one state to another. Hand coloring over a woodcut that’s in black and white then printing the block again over the color that I painted on then taking a rag soaked in turpentine and rubbing it over the print then put an etching over that. It’s more than that, though it is the freedom to change when I want to and for the image to grow.”
The twenty-four works created between 1981 and 2015 and gathered together in this exhibition bear witness to this joy of discovery and the pleasure of producing variations on a handful of favourite themes. The heart, symbol of the palette and the feminine, sits alongside ghostly bathrobes, self-portraits in hidden form, and several incarnations of the Venus de Milo, ageless emblem of Western culture and lost civilizations.
Jim Dine, now nearly 85, lives and works in Montrouge, near Paris, Göttingen (Germany) and Walla Walla on the American west coast. Since his first exhibition in 1960, his work has appeared in almost 300 solo shows. It also features in over 70 public collections across the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Collection in London.
In 2018, the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou held a major exhibition centring on his twenty-six-work donation. The exhibition travelled to the Centre Pompidou Malaga then the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. In Rome, his work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (until 2 June 2020). In spring 2020, a collection of his prints will be shown in France as part of the inauguration of the Fondation Helenis-GGL in Montpellier and his commissioned work Faire danser le plafond, a ceiling specially made for the 17th-century mansion in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres.
A Heart on the Rue de Grenelle
The artist
Born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Dine lives and works in Paris, Göttingen (Germany) and Walla Walla (USA). Pioneer of the happening and associated with the Pop Art movement, he has always followed a unique path. He experiments extensively with different techniques, working with wood, lithography, photography, metal, stone and paint. The tool and the creative process are just as important as the finished work. The artist explores the themes of the self, the body and memory, drawing on a personal iconography made up of hearts, veins, skulls, Pinocchio and tools.
