Public Opening          Friday, March 15, 2024           6-8 PM

125 Newbury presents Jim Dine: The Sixties, an exhibition that assembles more than a dozen paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Jim Dine, a major figure in New York’s postwar avant-garde. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dine was central to the city’s Happenings movement and to the emergence of Pop. This selection of early works—dating from 1959 to 1973—reflects Dine’s exploration of the poetic force of everyday things. The show grows from the longtime friendship between the artist and Arne Glimcher, who presented numerous exhibitions of Dine’s work at Pace Gallery beginning in 1976. Celebrating the eclecticism and adventurousness of the artist’s early experimentations, the show traces key themes in the arc of his development over a 15-year period.

The exhibition begins with Dine’s seminal painting Car Crash (1959-60), which shares a title with the Happening that he produced in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. A tenebrous, heavily worked surface of black pigment on burlap radiates with somber intensity, memorializing two car accidents the artist experienced in quick succession during the summer of 1959—pivotal and traumatic events that would shadow his work during this period. The shape of a crudely scrawled cross, which would become a motif in Dine’s iconography, repeats across the painting’s surface. Halfway between gesture and symbol, the cross recurs in other works from this series, suggesting at once a roadside memorial and a universal symbol of succor.

For Dine, making is an act of transfiguration. Virtuosic sculptures depicting hard industrial objects miraculously take on the suppleness of flesh, while the soft contours of the fabric neckties in the artist’s paintings somehow assume statue-like solidity. An old leather boot resting on its side on a velvet cushion has the alluring corpulence of a reclining Venus. Neckties flash with menacingly metallic edges. A pair of upright hammers are elongated in a suggestively organic poise, forming an architecture of ingress or retreat. Elsewhere, the outlines of painters’ palettes become windows into a landscape littered with car mirrors and electric fans, reflectors, and conductors.

Throughout the works in the exhibition, Dine infiltrates and disrupts the ordinary flow of things. With the confidence of a latter-day Old Master, he orchestrates a sense of subtle crescendo, celebrating the triumph of nature through the glories of facture. His painterly and sculptural investments are rooted in his early experimentations in performance and poetry. Much like fellow artists of the period, including Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Whitman—Dine’s co-conspirators in the Happenings—he embraced Dadaist sensibilities and pushed them to their most radical conclusions. As the paintings and sculptures in this exhibition attest, Dine’s work from this period helped fundamentally reshape the contours of what art could be.

BIOGRAPHY

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.

Major institutional exhibitions include Jim Dine, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970); Jim Dine: Five Themes, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1984); Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959–1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999); Jim Dine: A Life of Print, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Jim Dine in the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou Málaga, Málaga, Spain (2019); and Jim Dine, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020).

Dine's work can be found in numerous global public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.