Jim Dine
Wetterling Gallery is proud to announce a new exhibition in our project room with the American artist Jim Dine. It is Dine's 11th solo exhibition with gallery, open from April 16 - May 22, with an opening reception April 15, 3 - 7 pm.
Throughout Jim Dine’s career, spanning over six decades, painting, drawing, sculptures, photography and even poetry recitals are included in his artistic œuvre. However, printmaking stands out and plays a vital and important role. Just since 2001, Dine has produced over 750 prints using various techniques such as lithography, woodcuts, etching, drypoint, monotype as well as aquatint.
Just before the lockdown began in spring 2020, due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Dine immersed himself in the print studio, making a new series of works. Together with printers Gabi Pechmann and Christoph Chavanne, Dine created a monumental series of new woodcuts in their studio in Austria. As before, he used unconventional tools, for example a chainsaw, so create the complex surfaces in the blocks used when printing. He also worked with the editions in several stages; reusing old blocks, painting over the print, and adding paint afterwards.
“I don’t like to waste anything. I’ve never thrown a drawing or a painting away – I’ve always reused, recycled it somehow. I don’t usually print out the edition and then carve again into the block. I like to keep the blocks and then reuse them, and then change the image by putting another kind of block on top and then printing it out and then reprinting on top of that. That’s the pleasure of printing, not absurdly – it’s printing.”
- Jim Dine, interview with Cristea Roberts Galley, 2019
As for the motives of the new series of works, Dine returned to his iconic images of the heart, the bathrobe and the torso. Each work is a renewed investigation into the possibilities of printmaking. How large can a print be? How many colors can be used for one single edition? Dine has never compromised or been afraid to push the boundaries and continues to do so in this new suite of woodcuts. The works will also be included in the forthcoming new volume of Dine’s print catalogue raisonné, compiled by Tobias Burg, published by Steidl.
Born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati, Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, Massachusetts and Ohio University, Athens, USA. Since his first solo exhibition in New York in 1960, Dine has had over 300 solo exhibitions worldwide, most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). His work has been recognised with retrospectives including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1999), and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2004). Dine lives and works in Paris, France, and in Walla Walla, Washington.