Jim Dine: Dog on the Forge

American artist Jim Dine (born 1935) works across a seemingly boundless range of mediums―painting, printing, drawing, sculpture, photography, poetry, performance art and bookmaking. Dine made his first works while still in high school, and since then, over the course of seven decades, he has explored and respectfully disrespected materials and processes across the gamut of artistic mediums. He takes this approach to a new intensity in Dog on the Forge, the book accompanying his exhibition of the same name at the Palazzo Rocca, a Collateral Event at La Biennale di Venezia. Here Dine reinvents some of his most beloved motifs, including Pinocchio, antique sculpture, hearts and tools, all in eclectic combinations of mediums such as painted bronze and collage on canvas. The results, vibrating with restless, sometimes frenzied energy, are a transcendent leap into the unpredictable future of Dine’s never-ceasing creativity.