Three Ships | TEMPLON

“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.

“I’m always interested when I have an insight into my unconsciousness.”

Jim Dine, 2023

Article

Templon is proud to welcome the great American artist Jim Dine, now 87, for the first time in its new Chelsea space.

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.

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. 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.

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.

All works

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.