Jim Dine

From the collection of the Pompidou Center

MOSCOW CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE
MULTIMEDIA ART MUSEUM, MOSCOW
MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE, CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU
’ART, SCIENCE AND SPORT’ CHARITY FOUNDATION

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by the American artist Jim Dine. Works included in the exhibition were donated by Jim Dine to the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where his retrospective was held to great acclaim in February — April 2018. The artist himself selected twenty eight works from the period 1961 to 2016 for his gift to the french museum, motivated by his desire to make a tribute to France.

In Jim Dine’s own words, the donation to the Centre Pompidou was intended to ‘repay his personal and cultural debt to France’ for the long years he spent in Paris, and for the particularly French aesthetic that has inspired his work. Thanks to the artist’s generous gift, the Centre Pompidou now owns the largest collection of Dine’s painting and sculpture.

Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, in the state of Ohio. In 1958 he moved to New York and began working as an artist, quickly winning recognition for his Environments and Happenings created with Claes Oldenburg at the Judson Gallery.

In the early 1960s Dine started using everyday objects in his works, which art critics and the general public dubbed Pop Art. Inspired by the works of Neo-Dada artists, he explored the relationship of painting and sculpture with objects in the surrounding world.

Dine turned to drawing in the 1970s, and by the end of the decade led him to ‘rediscover’ figurative representation.

In the early 1980s Dine appropriated the stylistic elements of ancient civilisations in his works, in combination with iconic works of art and images from popular culture. In his output from this period a sensitivity to artistic forms of the past emerged; his art from the 1980s is also marked by the large amount of manual work and imbued with personal symbols.
As a homage to abstract expressionism, whose importance for his work Dine never denied, the artist has created a series of large-scale works in recent years under the general title ‘Concrete Paintings’, using the method of repeatedly applying and then blasting away layers of acrylic paint mixed with sand.

Among Dine’s works now held in the Centre Pompidou collection are many hidden self-portraits. Autobiographical motifs are constantly present in Dine’s art: they appear in works that include images of tools and are inspired by childhood memories; in pictures partly including the artist’s clothing; in sculptural and pictorial works with characters such as Pinocchio, the author’s alter ego.

The Jim Dine exhibition is permeated by his poetry. Since the 1960s poetry has played a key role in his oeuvre and developed along the same trajectories as his painting and sculpture. Dine’s poems are devised along the principle of collage and hence the artist treats the word as a material object that possesses volume and weight.

Jim Dine’s first retrospective in Russia is uniquely all-inclusive and provides a comprehensive view of the celebrated artist’s entire creative journey over five decades.

Maria Krasnikova, Director of the ‘Art, Science and Sport’ Charity Foundation, commented on the opening of the exhibition: ‘We are very pleased to collaborate with the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, with whom we present works by artists from the unique collection at the Centre Pompidou, the citadel of contemporary art, in Russia for the second year running: the exhibition by Constantin Brancusi, one of the best 20th-century sculptors, already proved a great success in 2017. In September 2018 we display the work of the talented Jim Dine, one of the creators of Pop Art’.