Jim Dine returns to Galerie Templon in an
explosion of colours, forms and techniques as he explores his
favourite themes: the creative act, the self, and memory. At the
age of 82, the American artist and poet, hard at work in his
Montrouge studio, has never felt so free. The gallery is
revealing a previously unseen series of paintings the artist
produced in his new studio during summer 2017.
Each piece in the collection of self-portraits, abstract
compositions and object-based landscapes tackles the same
subject: painting itself, its inspiration, its production, and
how its boundaries can be pushed. Each one bears within it the
traces of pentimenti , a memory of the physical force from which
it sprung. The surfaces of the canvases are worked with acrylic
and sand, using a grinder, thus acquiring volume and materiality:
Jim Dine emerges in a new dimension.
With his passion for engraving, the artist found inspiration in
Edward Munch’s woodcuts for a new series of hallucinatory prints
put together like puzzles. The artist overprints his media,
incorporates new fragments and uses a chainsaw to draw new
details, accumulating layers to the limits of the possible.
Endless variations of the black ring of his head, as
recognisable as the Norwegian artist’s The Scream , are produced
by the different lines, colours and motifs. The highlight of the
exhibition comes in the form of a 2, 5 metre bronze
self-portrait: the artist’s head bristling with tools, as though
proclaiming the power of the hand, over the power of the head?
Address: 30 RUE BEAUBOURG IMPASSE BEAUBOURG 75003 PARIS. Hours:
Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 7 pm. Opening:
Born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Dine lives and works in
Paris (Montrouge), Göttingen (Germany) and Walla Walla (USA).
Pio neer of the happening along with Claes Oldenburg and Allan
Kaprow in 1960s New York, he was quick to strike out on a unique
path. Although his name is often associated with the Pop Art
movement, his work defies categorisation. He experiments with a
huge ra nge of techniques and throws out the rule book in his
work with wood, lithography, photography, metal and stone. In
his view, the tool and the process are as crucial as the
finished work. Since Jim Dine’s work was first shown in 1960, it
has been presented at over 300 solo exhibitions all over the
world. His work also features in more than 70 public collections
t hroughout the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, Musée National d’A rt M oderne – Centre
Pompidou in P aris, and Tate Collection in London. In 2016, Jim
Dine was invited to collaborate with the Manufacture de Sèvres .
It was there that he created Thru the stardust, the heat on the
lawn (Claude) , a series of 10 vases sculp tures in varnished
terracotta, the lids stuck with tools and the surfaces covered
with calligraphed poems penned by the artist. They will be on
display at the Jardin de Tuileries in Paris as part of the FIAC
Hors les Murs programme in October 2017.
In
early 2018, the M NAM – Centre Pompidou will be
dedicating an exhibition to the artist’s extraordinary donation
of around twenty of his works
The first written work in French dedicated to the artist in 10
years, a catalogue in French and English will be published to
mark the exhibition. The catalogue opens with an interview of
the artist by Guy Boyer, journalist and editor of Connaissance
des Arts magazine .