Jim Dine “The Black Paintings”

Richard Gray

[Image: Jim Dine "The History of Screams - Bernini Damaged by a Crack" (2015) Credit: Andrea Veneri.]

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Richard Gray Gallery presents The Black Paintings, a solo exhibition of recent abstract works by Jim Dine.

The Black Paintings are a series of eight large-format works first conceived in 2015 at Jim Dine’s studio in Walla Walla, Washington. Built from a thick impasto of acrylic paint, sand and charcoal, Dine carefully works each canvas with an electric sander to achieve distinct and textured surfaces. A dominant configuration of related black shapes anchors the composition of each painting, which the artist explains “evokes a figurative image that was (and is) human, yet [is] visually concrete so that the black forms can be interpreted unconsciously as many things.”
The group of eight canvases makes its US debut at Richard Gray Gallery, having been shown in 2017 at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Championed by Accademia lecturer and architect Francesco Moschini, the paintings “tell us things that cannot be guessed at from even the most perfect of photographs…there is an order to the action and an astutely calibrated tension between the darker areas and those that are lighter in color.”

Jim Dine: The Black Paintings is the artist’s fourteenth solo exhibition with Richard Gray Gallery, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introductory text by the artist.

Jim Dine (b. 1935, Cincinnati, Ohio) arrived in New York City in 1958 and rose quickly to prominence for his formative role in creating the first “Happenings” with Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras, Allan Kaprow and others. Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and he received his BFA from Ohio University, Athens.

Dine’s extensive practice in painting, drawing, sculpting and printmaking has been the subject of more than 300 solo exhibitions around the world, including eleven major surveys and retrospectives since 1970. These include: Paris Reconnaissance (2018), a monumental retrospective spanning sixty years of Dine’s paintings and sculpture at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; I Never Look Away (2016), a retrospective survey of Dine’s self-portraiture at the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Jim Dine (2011), the first retrospective of the artist’s sculpture at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Drawings of Jim Dine (2004), a major traveling survey organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Jim Dine: Walking Memory (1999), a career retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Jim Dine: Five Themes (1984-85), a survey organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, which traveled to the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, the Akron Art Museum, Akron, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and Jim Dine (1970), a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Over 70 international public collections hold Dine’s work, including the: Art Institute, Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.