Jim Dine Bücher

Storm of Memory celebrates 25 years of Jim Dine’s ongoing residency in Göttingen and productive friendship with his printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl. Dine’s eclectic choice of subject and media for the book reflects what he calls “the climate of everything possible here with Gerhard S.” Works include “Elysian Fields,” a series of grand plaster heads inspired by antiquity and “lost friends and fragments of my life”; “The Secret Drawings,” majestic, dark, vibrating, abstract with hints of figuration; prints of his beloved motifs Pinocchio, hearts, bathrobes, tools and classical torsos; and photo documentation of “Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets),” Dine’s site-specific installation at Kunsthaus Göttingen of handwritten poetry, sculpture and self-portraiture. Published to coincide with Dine’s 88th birthday on 16 June 2023 and the opening of his exhibition of the same name at the Kunsthaus, Storm of Memory chronicles the restless present of his nearly seven-decade career and underlines the roles Göttingen and Steidl have played as a crucible for his creativity. Exhibition 17 June - 17 September 2023 at Kunsthaus Göttingen

Das Museum Folkwang widmet sich in einer umfassenden Ausstellung dem grafischen Werk des amerikanischen Pop- Art-Künstlers Jim Dine. Die Retrospektive zum achtzigsten Geburtstag ermöglicht mit rund 150 Werken – darunter Holzschnitte, Lithografien und Radierungen – einen vielseitigen Einblick in Dines grafisches Schaffen, das mehr als fünf Jahrzehnte umfasst. Wie kaum ein anderer Künstler seiner Generation ist Jim Dine vom Drucken als technischem Prozess fasziniert. Ganz besonders schätzt er das Experimentelle des Druckvorgangs, der sich nie bis ins letzte Detail vorausplanen lässt. Dine kombiniert verschiedenste Drucktechniken auf dem selben Blatt und entwickelt vollkommen neue Methoden, die Druckplatte zu bearbeiten – immer wieder unterstützt von Meisterdruckern wie Aldo Crommelynck oder Kurt Zein, mit denen er eng zusammengearbeitet hat. Im Katalog fächern sieben Werkgruppen das thematische Spektrum der Druckgrafik Jim Dines auf – von den berühmten Herzen über die stetig wiederkehrende Auseinandersetzung mit dem eigenen Ich bis hin zu seiner Faszination für die Geschichte Pinocchios. Zwei Essays geben einen tieferen Einblick in die technischen Besonderheiten der Grafik Dines und in die ihm so wichtige Kooperation mit Druckern in verschiedenen Ländern und Werkstätten.

“Inspired by a semi-autobiographical book by the mid-20th century German printmaker HAP Grieshaber, I have used his idea to create a story of fifty years as a printmaker. The book includes interviews with my printers and memories of my life around the prints I made at that time. I have made over a thousand prints so far and I am not done yet. There are “key” images illustrated, and the text attempts to marry the technical with my emotional feeling for the mediums, etching, lithography, woodcut and silkscreen. I have included recipes for variations on intaglio and some stories of my friendships with these gifted artisans who have produced this work.” Jim Dine

Jim Dine began as one of the first-generation Pop artists in the 1960s, and went on to become widely admired in the 1970s for his prodigious drawing and printmaking activities. For the last several years he has developed and worked with a particular fascination for Carlo Collodi's popular tale of a wooden boy who becomes real, and who has served as a sort of muse for Dine, the inspiration for numerous drawings, photographs, paintings, artist's books and sculptures. "When I was six years old my mother took me to see the Disney Pinocchio film," Dine "it has haunted my heart forever! Geppetto and the author, Carlo Collodi, gave the boy the chance to come to consciousness and therefore join us in this Vale of Tears. His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his constant lying, his temporary donkey ears... It all adds up to make the sum of him." This volume, Steidl's third volume to stem from Dine's Pinocchio series, features works that exploit and improvise on the allegory, satire and wit of this classic tale.

This book of 85 drawings by Jim Dine illustrates the range and mastery of the artist's draftsmanship over more than four decades. The variety and breadth of the selection shows the intense way Dine observes the world around him and the excitement with which he records it on paper. Dine has said that his ability to draw is both a privilege and the result of hard physical training, compelling him to move inexorably forward to capture the next idea or the next psychological insight in drawings that are extraordinarily human. The selection includes early tool pencil drawings and collages, as well as powerful portrait and figure studies in a variety of media. Also included are large painterly pastels executed with a bravura that places them somewhere between painting and drawing. Dine sees his paintings and drawings as essentially conceived and developed in the same way--requiring the same amount of time, emotion and physicality of medium. The only difference, in the end, is that the drawings are on paper.