Jim Dine - Montrouge Paintings

The first written work in French dedicated to the artist in 10 years, a catalogue in French and English has been published to mark the exhibition. The book opens with an interview of the artist by Guy Boyer, journalist and editor of Connaissance des Arts magazine.

Jim Dine returns to galerie Templon in an explosion of colours, forms and techniques as he explores his favourite themes: the creative act, the self, and memory. At the age of 82, the American artist and poet, hard at work in his Montrouge studio, has never felt so free.

The gallery is revealing a previously unseen series of paintings the artist produced in his new studio during summer 2017. Each piece in the collection of self-portraits, abstract compositions and object-based landscapes tackles the same subject: painting itself, its inspiration, its production, and how its boundaries can be pushed. Each one bears within it the traces of pentimenti, a memory of the physical force from which it sprung. The surfaces of the canvases are worked with acrylic and sand, using a grinder, thus acquiring volume and materiality: Jim Dine emerges in a new dimension.

With his passion for engraving, the artist found inspiration in Edward Munch’s woodcuts for a new series of hallucinatory prints put together like puzzles. The artist overprints his media, incorporates new fragments and uses a chainsaw to draw new details, accumulating layers to the limits of the possible. Endless variations of the black ring of his head, as recognisable as the Norwegian artist’s The Scream, are produced by the different lines, colours and motifs. The highlight of the exhibition comes in the form of a 2, 5 metre bronze self-portrait: the artist’s head bristling with tools, as though proclaiming the power of the hand, over the power of the head?

Born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Dine lives and works in Paris, Göttingen (Germany) and Walla Walla (USA). Pioneer of the happening and associated with the Pop Art movement, he has always followed a unique path. He experiments extensively with different techniques, working with wood, lithography, photography, metal, stone and paint. The tool and the creative process are just as important as the finished work. The artist explores the themes of the self, the body and memory, drawing on a personal iconography made up of hearts, veins, skulls, Pinocchio and tools.