05 - A peek behind the curtain
We caught up with Jim this morning as he was beginning the installation of DOG ON THE FORGE in Venice. He shares his thoughts Below:
Jim Dine arrives in Venice for the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
We’re in the midst of installing Dog on the Forge in the Palazzo Rocca. This big room that I’m standing in is empty now, but it’s going to have six big paintings and another huge one at the end of the space.
Large sculptures will go out in the garden and another sculpture will run along the center of this main hall.
Everything has been planned for this space. All the paintings—I made specifically for the niches in the walls of this grand room.
There are four paintings that are 7.5 feet square and two that are 7 x 12 feet, and a 14 foot square painting that will go at the end of the room opposite the Grand Canal.
It’s all been done specifically for this space.
When the show is over, the works will go different places, but right now, they belong here.
—Jim Dine
Site-specific paintings for the Palazzo Rocca, Venice.
“…I made all the paintings [in this exhibition] specifically for the niches in the walls of this grand room.”
— Jim Dine, Palazzo Rocca, Venice, 2024
Jim working on Fragile Landscape with Shadows, 2024
A NOTE FROM DANIEL CLARKE
(JIM’S STUDIO MANAGER)
Photograph of Daniel Clarke by Matt Dine.
When Jim began discussing Dog on the Forge with me, my mind raced between the studio and the retrospective exhibition that Jim had in Rome in 2020. The exhibition, curated by Daniela Lancioni at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, opened two weeks before the world shut down due to Covid. We had just installed Grace and Beauty in Paris and were looking towards putting together Three Ships in New York the following Spring. This was September 2022.
I felt like we were embarking on a 100 mile foot race through the Rockies.
For me, working in such close proximity to Jim, I saw this as an opportunity to build on what Jim showed in Rome, but with the work coming out of the studio, not the past. As an artist it is important to exist today.
In the first room of the Palazzo in Rome there were three drawings from 1959, done in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, which are now part of the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. I looked to these drawings as a preface to what potentially could be the foundation of the show to come in Venice, to come full circle with 60 years of making in between.
Often, in interviews and articles we read of Jim’s boundless energy. Well, it’s true. The concentration and focus that brought this exhibition to life was very inspiring to me.
We began with a site visit in Venice to choose the venue and decide who to ask to curate the exhibition. The choice was obvious, Gerhard Steidl. Jim had been working on an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Göttingen for the summer of 2023, and the experience of working with Gerhard in this capacity proved very rich.
Gerhard met us at the Palazzo Rocca in Venice and we began to plan the exhibition you will see opening in the next weeks. Panels needed to be made to fit the architecture of the Palazzo, permissions granted from the different Venice agencies to do what we wanted to do, and then Jim was off to the foundry at St. Gallen to see what was possible given the tight time-frame. The rest is eight months of extreme engagement and criss-crossing Europe many times over to see this expression take form.
This show is also a tribute to the rich collaborations that Jim has nurtured over the years with Gerhard Steidl and the Kunstgiesserei in St. Gallen, where it’s impossible to cite just one person, so fluidly do they work as a collective.
As his assistant in this adventure, the result is the beautiful expression of how at 88 years old, one can put oneself out there, in danger, on the edge.
—Daniel Clarke
Daniel Clarke and Jim Dine in Munich, April 2019 at the Kunstfoyer exhibition. Photographed by Matt Dine.
STEIDL REFLECTS:
Diana Michener, Gerhard Steidl, and Jim Dine in Göttingen, Germany.
Jim Dine is an exceptional artist who works across a seemingly boundless range of media—painting, printing (etching, lithography, linocuts, serigraphy and more), drawing, sculpture, photography, poetry, performance art and bookmaking.
Unlike artists who focus on a single medium, Jim, since his first works made while still at high school, has—over the course of seven decades—explored and respectfully disrespected materials and processes.
He takes this approach to a new intensity in his exhibition Dog on the Forge at the Palazzo Rocca, a Collateral Event at La Biennale di Venezia. Here Jim re-invents some of his most beloved motifs, including Pinocchio, antique sculpture, hearts and tools, all in eclectic combinations of media such as painted bronze and collage on canvas.
The results, vibrating with restless, sometimes frenzied energy, are a transcendent leap into the unpredictable future of Jim Dine’s never-ceasing creativity.
- Gerhard Steidl
See you in venice.
Jim Dine’s “Dog on the Forge” at Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù
April 20 – July 21, 2024
JIM DINE
DOG ON THE FORGE
20 April — 21 July 2024
La Biennale di Venezia
Organizing Institution: Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany
Supported by TEMPLON
