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DEUTSCHLANDPREMIERE DES PHOTOGRAPHISCHEN WERKES VON JIM DINE:
Jim Dine, The Photographs, so far
14. Mai bis 1. August 2004
Raum 1, 2 und 3
(Köln, Mediapark)
Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln
In this current exhibition, the artist Jim Dine (b. 1935) for the first time allows a comprehensive insight into his little-known photographic work. The exhibition includes more than a hundred large-format items in a variety of photographic techniques, such as the now little-used heliogravure, silver-gelatin prints, Polaroids, chromogenic and digital colour prints. Sometimes Dine also combines different techniques in one print.
Jim Dine, who must be accounted one of the outstanding artists of the present day, began to attract considerable attention on the New York art scene as long ago as the 1950s. He is known among other things for his unusual assemblages, in which he integrates utilitarian objects such as tools – symbolizing the artistic process – or items of clothing – for example a dressing-gown to symbolize his own self. One of his first pictures to use the motif of the dressing-gown dates from 1964 and goes back to an advertisement photograph in the New York Times. In addition, Jim Dine began at an early stage to experiment in the sphere of Performance. Together with Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow he staged the first Happenings. Along with Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and George Segal, Jim Dine was also part of the inner circle of a group of artists who regularly exhibited together in the Judson Gallery in New York.
Many of Jim Dine’s motifs, including his iconographic confrontation with the symbol of the heart, as well as his art-historical references, such as, for example, to the Venus di Milo, can be related both to his own person and to fundamental questions of what it is to be human. His resources are not so much advertising, and thus the world of goods and consumption; rather, his themes and motifs result from his intensive confrontation with classical modern art, with the Ancient World, and with poetry. Against this background, Jim Dine sees himself as less of a protagonist of American Pop Art, with which his work is still directly linked even today.
Alongside painting, graphic works and sculpture, photography has been claiming a more important place in Dine’s work since the 1990s. It too reflects his own world of ideas and language. Through symbolically charged objects such as the literary figure of Pinocchio, or the raven and the owl, which as stuffed birds come back to life in his pictures, Jim Dine composes penetrating tableaux, often in the form of self-portraits. A characteristic feature is the integration of text and language, mostly in the form of hand-sketched poems of his own composition, which take shape on the walls of his studio, and in his photographs, so to speak as a condensation of the graphic process, form themselves into new written characters. Poetry has played an important role from the very earliest stages of his artistic career. In his photography, Jim Dine returns, via the objectification of the written word in the picture, to his poetic roots once more.
In the early 1960s Jim Dine was introduced by Lee Friedlander to the work of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, and soon began his own collection of photographs and books of photographs. In 1966 he was commissioned to illustrate “Le počte assassiné” by the French poet and art-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, for which purpose he used his own photographs, drawings and collages. In the late 1970s, Jim Dine worked, as part of the Kodak programme, for the first time with the large 20 x 24-inch Polaroid camera. In 1994, as visiting professor at the Hochschule der Künste (Art Academy) in Berlin, he began working in the medium of photography, work which continues to this day.
An exhibition project of the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a four-volume publication of the same title, published by the Steidl Verlag, Göttingen (€ 150).
Photographien:
© Jim Dine; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2004
Links zum Thema:
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris
Wesleyan University Davison Art Center, Middletown, Connecticut
Hasselblad Center, Göteborg Museum of Art
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