PRESENTATION: Jim Dine-Three Ships

Pioneer of the happening and associated with the Pop Art movement, Jim Dine 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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gallery Templon Archive

With the exhibition “Three Ships”, Jim Dine signs a 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. The exhibition 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. Jim Dine studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and at Ohio University. He moved to New York City in 1958, and there he became part of a group of artists who initiated Happenings, an early form of performance art. His early work consists primarily of images on canvas to which three-dimensional objects (e.g., articles of clothing, garden tools) are attached. His Shoes Walking on My Brain (1960), for example, is a childlike painting of a face with a pair of leather shoes fixed to the forehead. His reputation was secured during the 1960s by his wittily incongruous painted images of tools, clothes, and other utilitarian and household objects. He is particularly associated with the bathrobe and the stylized heart. The subject of Dine’s work of the 1970s remained commonplace objects, but he showed a growing preoccupation with graphic media. His exploitation of nuances of line and texture is especially evident in his images of flowers and portraits of his wife, Nancy Dine (separated 1966 and divorced 2006), done in the late 1970s.

Photo: Jim Dine, Three Ships (the Magi), 2022, Bronze, 284 × 267 × 234 cm, 112 × 105 × 92 in., Exhibition view at the Blue Mountain foundry, Baker City, Oregon, © Jim Dine, Courtesy the artist and Gallery Templon

Info: Gallery Templon, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/6-30/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.templon.com/