Jim Dine

Storm of Memory celebrates 25 years of partnership between American artist Jim Dine (born 1935) and publisher Gerhard Steidl, as well as Dine’s continued residency in Göttingen, Germany, where Steidl’s operation is based. In this publication, Dine selects an eclectic collection of artwork to reflect what he calls “the climate of everything possible here with Gerhard S,” including Elysian Fields, The Secret Drawings and prints featuring his beloved motifs of Pinocchio, hearts and tools. The selection culminates in “Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets),” Dine’s site-specific installation at Kunsthaus Göttingen, comprising sculpture, self-portraiture and handwritten poetry. Published to celebrate Dine’s 88th birthday as well as the opening of his eponymous exhibition, Storm of Memory chronicles the recent activity of Dine’s nearly seven-decade career and underlines the roles Göttingen and Steidl have played as a crucible for his creativity.

American artist Jim Dine (born 1935) has a six-decades-long career spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography and poetry. This latest collection of his intensely autobiographical poems consists of five volumes probing themes of anti-Semitism, racism, climate change and failed world leaders.

In A Beautiful Day, American artist Jim Dine (born 1935) presents 17 poems, including new pieces written during the coronavirus lockdown; others are older works he has recently rediscovered and reshaped.

Well known for his depictions of self, Jim Dine (born 1935) reveals in Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest another portrait of sorts. Presenting nearly seven decades of drawing, from 1957 to the present, Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest demonstrates the deep fusion between Dine’s practice and those who have long been part of his world. His wife, photographer Diana Michener, appears in multiple, heavily worked portraits. Images of close friends and fellow creatives are scattered throughout the publication, including drawings of artist Susan Rothenberg, printer Aldo Crommelynck, poet Robert Creeley, and printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl, with whom he created this book. The blemishes, wrinkles and stains that imprint themselves on the flesh similarly appear on the surfaces of Dine’s drawings as he encounters his subjects over time. Providing a poignant reflection on a career characterized by digesting the world through making, Dine concludes: “This is what I’m left with. I’m left with drawing.”

With its fairy-tale yet matter-of-fact title, Grace and Beauty reveals Jim Dine’s (born 1935) unquenchable enthusiasm for reimagining his iconic personal motifs—here, the classical torso, hearts and tools—in experimental combinations of mediums. The book contains his most recent works, all from 2022: mixed-media assemblages, and monumental bronze and stainless-steel sculptures—“an army of sculptures: flowers, machines and primitive skulls at once”—which he often adorns with thick coats of explosive color. These are hybrid forms between sculpture and painting whose stark contrasts display the artist’s quest for new territories of beauty. Dine introduces each group of works with a short personal text and complements them with documentary photographs taken at Kunstgiesserei St.Gallen, where his sculptures are made—the site of his proud collaboration with the foundry’s expert team.

This book accompanies the recent Galerie Templon exhibition of the work of American artist Jim Dine (born 1935), which explores the autobiographical excavation at the heart of his work today. Here the focus lies on three self-reflective series from the past three years, each in a different medium. Drawing the Minutes and Me employ pencils, paper and oil on canvas to create a shifting typography of the artist. The titular work of the exhibition, Three Ships, is a set of monumental bronze sculptures studded with branches, ropes and dozens of tools: one of his most beloved motifs. With short personal texts by the artist and photos documenting him at work at the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen foundry, Three Ships is a testament to Dine’s transformative versatility, which sweeps across seven decades and shows no sign of abating.

During the peak of the Coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, Jim Dine (born 1935) recalibrated his creative routine and recorded his experiences as blurred self-portraits, studio still lifes and appropriated texts in book form.

Read aloud by Jim Dine (born 1935), here are his poems (with, in Ron Padgett’s words, their “wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no-holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration”), an autobiography, a remembrance of Robert Creeley and a song by Dine written some half-century ago.

Within Jim Dine’s (born 1935) diverse oeuvre, printmaking plays a consistent and overarching role. For six decades now, the artist’s enthusiasm for woodcuts, etching and lithography, for drypoint, monotypes and aquatints has not diminished—on the contrary, since 2001 Dine has produced over 750 prints in which he repeatedly discovers fresh expression for his iconic motifs: the hearts and bathrobes, the antique torsos and flowers, not to mention Pinocchio.

I Print is the latest in a series of scholarly catalogues raisonnés on Dine’s printed oeuvre and comprehensively documents all works produced since 2001, including information on their dimensions, print runs and papers, the complex printing processes that often combine techniques, as well as the printers and workshops involved in their realization. This opulent publication of nearly 400 pages also lists the artist’s books and portfolios that Dine has realized over the past 20 years; it is an indispensable reference for collectors, printmaking enthusiasts and academics alike.

In Jim Dine’s (born 1935) bluntly honest words, Electrolyte in Blue is a “long hate poem” about “the evil in our now small world and those who unleashed it,” exploring themes of anti-Semitism, racism, climate change, as well as the world leaders he condemns, prominent among them Donald Trump. Dine’s fury and disappointment are clear, yet his vision is not merely bleak. He lays his words over luminous etchings, aquatints and lithographs of botanical themes in buoyant color. Luscious foliage, flowers, fruit and vegetables celebrate the natural world and offer solace against the social, political and environmental concerns that Dine voices. The book is based upon the original Electrolyte in Blue, a unique book object in an edition of one, typeset and printed by hand by Ruth Lingen, with whom Dine has collaborated for decades.

This book presents for the first time Jim Dine’s (born 1935) Secret Drawings, a series of 45 drawings made between 2012 and 2018 in his studios in Walla Walla, Washington, and Paris. These works are the product of Dine’s intense, restless processes of application, erasure and most importantly reworking, using materials as diverse as charcoal, China ink, pastel, fixative, oil enamel and acrylic paints, as well as collage.

The textures of the papers—“what I had on the floor and lying around”—vary greatly, as do Dine’s tools, from sticks, brushes, knives and rotary grinders to the artist’s bare hands. For Dine himself, these drawings hold a more personal secrecy: “84 years ago (I am 84 years old) I emerged from a dark place … I have been depicting this landscape ever since … the thicket of marks and the anatomical reference is all here on the paper.”

Including dozens of documentary photos and two DVDs of Dine's poetry recitals, this volume is a privileged insight into this crucial aspect of his studio practice.

3 Cats and a Dog (Self-Portrait) comprises three photobooks by Jim Dine (born (1935)—Birds (2001), Entrada Drive (2005) and Tools (2017)—with a signed self-portrait etching printed over a lithograph. Dine’s photography is simultaneously a record of his immediate environment and a form of autobiography shaped by remembrance.

The protagonists of Birds are the white owl, symbol of innocence, and its jester-like companion, the black crow, who inhabited Dine’s Berlin studio in the winter of 1996.

Entrada Drive transports us to the silvery abundance of Los Angeles flora: the great succulents, fans of grass and proud birds of paradise encountered by Dine and his wife Diana Michener on their walks around their garden and to the Pacific Ocean while staying at 234 Entrada Drive in early 2001. Finally, we return to Dine’s studio in photos of the tools with which he makes art—paintbrushes, drills, hammers, pliers, scissors, saws, clamps and more.

Limited edition of 50 sets.

This book is American artist Jim Dine's (born 1939) letter to his "troops," a confessional address to the people he has collaborated with, to his friends and family.

Consisting of a long fluid poem and 18 color linocut portraits of those closest to Dine, this book explores the renowned pop artist's emotions and thoughts as he reflects on childhood memories, contemplates his current artistic practice ("This week I painted, painted, painted the possibility of permanent silence"), as well as more philosophical musings ("Earth gives birth to time and heaven in a jealous parliament").

This new Steidl book is an adaption with revised design and typography of Dine's original My Letter to the Troops of 2016, a limited edition of 40 featuring linocuts hand-printed on Arches vellum from the blocks at Atelier Michael Woolworth in Paris.

Jewish Fate is an evocative autobiographical poem by American artist Jim Dine (born 1939) accompanied by 18 lithographs of one of his favorite motifs—tools. Dine reminisces about his childhood days spent at his grandfather's hardware store in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he worked weekends and summers for ten years from the age of nine, sorting screws and opening barrels of nails to help out in the overflowing store.

Among the vivid memories of his former co-workers, one can trace the development of Dine's love for the aesthetics and utility of tools, the imagery of which continues to inform his artistic practices today. This longtime affection is seen in the drawings of hammers, rollers, brushes and wrenches depicted in this book, all realized in the artist's inimitable unfinished style.

This book is the catalog to Jim Dine’s (born 1935) exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, covering four decades of his varied and prodigious output. Over the past years Dine has donated large personal selections of his art to museums across Europe and the US, including the British Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One such gift to the Centre Pompidou, consisting of 24 paintings and sculptures from 1966 to the present, is the subject of this book. Featuring double-page reproductions of each work—covering Dine’s major motifs including his hearts, bathrobes, birds, self-portraits and tools—as well his new 40-page interview with Centre Pompidou director Bernard Blistène (supplemented with archival photos), this book is the most detailed survey to date of one of the most important contemporary artists.