PARIS.- As he approaches his 85th birthday, Jim Dine, the iconic figure of American contemporary art, unveiled the results of almost three years of work in a new show at
Galerie Templon. Partially produced at his Parisian studio during lockdown, the exhibition A Day Longer takes us on a thrillingly immersive journey into a body of work that is bolder and more introspective than ever.
Born in 1935, Jim Dine first gained recognition as one of the pioneers of the New York happenings in the 1950s before becoming a key figure in the Pop Art of the 1960s. A profoundly independent, multi-faceted artist and poet, Jim Dine soon began to strike out on his own. Drawing on sculpture, painting, prints and photography, he has developed an original language, partly abstract, partly figurative, haunted by a distinctive iconography formed by figures from antiquity, tools, hearts and the figure of Pinocchio. Jim Dine lives and works in Montrouge, a Parisian suburb, Göttingen in Germany and Walla Walla on the American west coast.
Since his first exhibition in 1960, his work has appeared in almost 300 solo shows. It also features in over 70 public collections across the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musée national dart moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Collection in London. In 2018, the Musée national dart moderne - Centre Pompidou held a major exhibition centring on works the American artist donated to the museum. The exhibition travelled to the Centre Pompidou Malaga then the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. In Rome, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni held a major retrospective of his work from February to June 2020.
The last decade has seen him creating an ever-expanding body of poetry and he regularly organises readings and performances of his poems alongside his exhibitions.
Early 2021, he will inaugurate the new Fondation GGL HELENIS in Montpellier with an exhibition and his spectacular commissioned work Faire danser le plafond, a ceiling specially made for the 17th-century manor house in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres.
To mark the exhibition, a 84-page catalogue has been published in French and English, with a preface written by Anne-Claudie Coric, Executive director of the Galerie Templon, as well as two essays by Annalisa Rimmaudo, Assistant curator, Contemporary collections et the Musée national dart moderne - Centre Pompidou, and John Yau, American poet, art critic and curator (ISBN : 978-2-917515-38-9).