10 - In the news
Named an ‘Unmissable Off-Site Exhibition in Venice’ by Frieze, Jim Dine: Dog on the Forge continues to garner rave reviews.
Press coverage has been enthusiastic, celebrating the ambitious scope and complexity of Jim’s work. Publications have highlighted the exhibition’s impressive installation and Jim’s ability to weave personal history with broader cultural narratives.
For those unable to visit in person, a comprehensive catalogue of the exhibition will be published by Editions Steidl, featuring an insightful essay by Curator Gerhard Steidl.
In addition to the good news from Venice, the recently closed exhibition at 125 Newbury received notable praise. The exhibition, Jim Dine: The Sixties, assembled more than a dozen paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by dating from 1959 to 1973—reflecting Jim’s exploration of the poetic force of everyday things.
As always, stay tuned for more updates and in-depth features on Jim’s latest projects and exhibitions.
—Jim Dine Studio
LE MONDE - AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, JIM DINE COMES TO “MEASURE UP” TO THE SUMPTUOUS PALAZZO ROCCA CONTARINI CORFU
Photography: Ugo Carmeni 2024
BY: Philippe Dagen PUBLISHED: 11 May 2024, Le Monde
The Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu is one of these sumptuous Venetian palaces, admirably placed at the corner of the Grand Canal and that of San Trovaso. Exterior and interior adorned with marble and gardens, frescoed ceilings and monumental staircase. For Jim Dine to present his recent works there, at the Venice Biennale, seems, a priori, a strange idea. Dine, who was born in 1935 in Ohio, is famous for his powerfully colored compositions, in which, from the 1960s, he introduced objects – tools most often, the figure of Pinocchio, hearts or heads seen from the front treated with broad gestures.
The tone is set from the garden: tall bronze vases bristling with hammers, pincers and blades. The title of the exhibition, “Dog on the Forge”, is written in bronze letters on the handle of a twisted carpenter's hammer more than four meters long, also made of bronze. The question is therefore obvious: what are Dine and his works doing in this place which seems so unsuitable for them?
“Measure yourself against it ,” the artist first responds. When the paintings arrived from my studio, they appeared completely different to me: it was as if they belonged to the palazzo. I was very surprised.” It is the same for the visitor. On the ground floor, where the rooms have fairly low ceilings and bare walls, the small paintings of heads are perfectly at home; likewise the very large ones in the noble gallery, upstairs, where they get along well with the decorative elements and the allegorical frescoes.
ATTACHMENT TO ANCIENT ART
Jim Dine would like to remind you immediately: he has often stayed in Venice and has already exhibited there. But the main thing, for him, is his attachment to ancient art. “Of course, I am classified as pop art, because I used tools in my paintings. But, actually, I have nothing to do with pop culture. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, who were all a little older than me, looked for elements of their style there. They were from bourgeois families, and it was not the world of their childhood. Me, yes, because I was born in a working-class environment. When I arrived in New York, I was a young guy who looked at Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso, not Coca Cola. And when De Kooning said to me: “Dine, you're a real painter,” it made me feel good, because that's what I wanted to be.”
This will be, in the entire conversation, the artist's only allusion to pop art. It is much more important for him to explain how, six years ago, he spent the winter in Rome. He managed to obtain the possibility of using a church as a workshop. “It was a small church, nothing remarkable. But I had the key, and there were sculptures, and I like to draw sculpture.” Four of these drawings are here: a deposition of a cross, two female figures and a candlestick. These large charcoals were worked and reworked – “with the fingers, by rubbing” – in the church, then in his workshop in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine). “I could still rework them.” It is the same with his paintings, which take a very long time to complete. “I always correct them, I correct them, I tend towards a perfection that I will naturally not achieve.”
The creation begins with a layer of transparent acrylic placed on the wooden support. He throws sea sand or workshop dust on it, lets it dry, then says: “As if I were jumping into cold water.” He makes a spot somewhere on the surface and the mental work begins. " Everything is possible.” Everything, and therefore to introduce objects or, now, copper serpentines which make curves and knots. Two explanations. The artistic: “These are lines in the air, drawing in space, dance.” The autobiographical: his grandfather, a plumber, used such tubes, whose brilliance fascinated him as a child. Technical details on the merits of lead and copper in plumbing follow.
INFLUENCE OF BONNARD
The genesis of small paintings is as long as that of large ones, “years, sometimes”. All suggest a face seen from the front, which shows through more or less clearly. So many self-portraits? He tried to avoid it, but, he notes ironically, his bald head and his eyes are still there. In front of one of these large heads, however, we evoke another subject: a representation of Christ. He starts by jumping, as if faced with an incongruity. Then admits that he once thought of the Shroud of Turin.
In this case, we continue, should we see in the hammers, pincers, saws and nails that he so often integrated into his painting and sculpture an allusion to the Arma Christi, a Latin and scholarly term which designates the instruments of the Passion of Christ, constantly present in the Christian iconography of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance? He hesitates.
This unexpected sentence follows: “As a child, Christianity terrified me.” He explains immediately. His ancestors were Jews from Poland and Lithuania, poor peasants who first settled in the south of the United States, in Georgia. But he was born in Ohio, after his parents moved from Georgia. “One day I asked my mother why. The answer was simple: because of the Ku Klux Klan. They were as racist against Jews as they were against blacks. When my great-grandmother died in Georgia, she was buried in the African American cemetery because she was Jewish. This is also the history of America.”
So he prefers to talk about painting again. As he cited Bonnard before, we come back to it. Art history generally states that Matisse's influence was significant in the United States and hardly cites Bonnard. “However, it was with him that I understood how to compose through color. And I'm definitely not alone. We were all watching Bonnard. I remember an exhibition fifty years ago at MoMA [in 1976]: a selection of modern paintings from private Swiss collections. The Bonnards that were there: a terrible shock. As powerful as the one I received here, in front of Titians. They made me understand what painting could be.” What he states in a formula difficult to translate without weakening it: “So fucking beautiful.” It applies to many of his paintings.
“Dog on the Forge.” Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu, Sestiere Dorsoduro, Venice (Italy). Until July 21. Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., free entry. dogontheforge.com
THE EXHIBITIONS AND COLLATERAL EVENTS TO SEE DURING THE 2024 BIENNALE (HARPER’S BAZAAR ITALIA)
Between festivals dedicated to media art and exhibitions of international artists, here are the most interesting events.
Photography: Ugo Carmeni 2024
BY: Francesca Damiano Desantis PUBLISHED: 17 April 2024 Harper’s Bazaar Italia
Strangers Everywhere : the title of this year's Venice Biennale is more evocative than ever. For Adriano Pedrosa, the curator of the exhibition which can be visited from 20 April to 24 November 2024 between the Gardens and the Arsenale, there could not be a better way to describe the current world , "full of multifaceted crises that concern the movement and existence of people within countries, nations, territories and borders, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, freedom and wealth". There are many national participations, as many collateral exhibitions that start at the same time as the Biennale; Harper's Bazaar has chosen some of the best in the city , during the opening period of the Biennale.
JIM DINE. DOG ON THE FORGE , PALAZZO ROCCA CONTARINI CORFU
Jim Dine, master of stars and stripes neo-Dada, arrives at Palazzo Rocca with Dog on the Forge: from 20 April until 21 July 2024, the exhibition presents paintings and drawings, bronze sculptures and a large installation – a group of works created specifically by the artist for the occasion. Gerhard Steidl, who curated the exhibition, was inspired by Dine's constant travels between Europe and the USA. “All my life I've been on the move,” says Dine, “It's hard for me to sit still. It's a hyperactive quality, I would say. I've always liked going from studio to studio, from one country to another. For me, travel It's like using red. It's another way to create the work."
JIM DINE GETS TO WORK
For Dine, physical labor and art-making are interchangeable: “When you paint every day, all year long, then the subject is essentially the act of working.”
BY: John Yau PUBLISHED: 2 April 2024, Hyperallergic
The exhibition Jim Dine: The ’60s at 125 Newbury gallery confirms my long-held belief that Dine was never a Pop artist. A pioneer of Happenings, which emerged as a response to Abstract Expressionism and the possibilities of transgressing the boundaries of the canvas, his roots are located at the intersection of these two movements and their commitment to improvisation. Dine further complicates this chronological view because — unlike many other artists associated with Pop art — he is committed to the practice of drawing, and its basis in the Renaissance. In love with classical art, particularly contour drawing, his fluid line is unrivaled among artists of his generation, and is one of his contributions to postwar art.
This exhibition also reveals something about Dine’s work that I had not fully grasped in the past: drawing was there from the beginning. In the artist’s mind, physical labor and art-making are essentially interchangeable activities. On Templon gallery’s website, he is quoted as saying: “When you paint every day, all year long, then the subject is essentially the act of working.” For Dine, there is neither a gap between art and life (as with Robert Rauschenberg) nor a disdain for labor (as with Andy Warhol).
BOOK A TOUR
Photography: Matthew Dine 2024
Private tours of Jim Dine: Dog on the Forge at the Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù in Venice are available from June 11-20, 2024, between 10 AM and 5 PM, daily. These tours, guided by Xiliary Twil from Art Asset Management Group, offer a personalized 30-45 minute walkthrough for journalists, curators, collectors, educators, critics, and advisors. Group tours can accommodate up to 25 people.
To book a tour, click here.
GIVEAWAY WINNER
Congratulations to Ann Thompson for winning the signed exhibition catalogue giveaway!
JIM DINE: DOG ON THE FORGE
136 pages, 85 images
Hardback
18 x 24 cm
English
ISBN 978-3-96999-363-7
Publication date 06/2024
€ 20.00 incl. VAT
Free shipping
*Exhibition catalogue available soon. Add to wishlist at steidl.de.
JIM DINE: DOG ON THE FORGE
20 April — 21 July 2024
La Biennale di Venezia
Organizing Institution: Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany
Supported by TEMPLON
