The Palazzo delle Esposizioni has devoted an extensive anthological retrospective to Jim Dine (Cincinnati, USA, 1935), one of the most prominent figures in American art whose radical and innovative work has been highly influential in contemporary visual culture, particularly with regard to Italian art in the 1960s.
Conceived in close collaboration with the artist and curated by Daniela Lancioni, the exhibition featured a total of 80 works dating from 1959 to 2018, from public and private collections both in Europe and the United States.
Accompanied by a commentary recorded by Dine himself, a wealth of photographic material provided the public with a visual memory of the renowned happenings, while a selection of video interviews enabled visitors to familiarise themselves with the figure of the artist.
Notwithstanding his popularity, Dine remains an artist who defies cataloguing, largely on account of his independent spirit and his reluctance to identify with the currents defined by critics, art history or the market. The autonomous, free attitude which he has consistently taken with regard to established values is exemplary. In this sense, one need only look at the story of his life, at his works clinging so tenaciously to his personal experiences, which some have described as being “uneducated”, even “disquieting”.
An important nucleus of the exhibition consisted of a body of works donated by Dine from 2017 to 2019 to the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre George Pompidou in Paris, which generously agreed to loan them for this occasion.
A sizeable number of Dine’s historic pieces came from private and public European collections, including Museo di Ca’ Pesaro in Venice and MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (both loaning works from the Sonnabend Collection), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz.
A selection of works came from the United States, including the two celebrated paintings from the 1960s entitled A Black Shovel. Number 2 (1962) and Long Island Landscape (1963) from the collection of the Whitney Museum in New York. American collections also loaned Shoe, from 1961, and The Studio (Landscape Painting), completed in 1963, both presented by Dine at the 1964 edition of the Venice Biennale.
The exhibition was accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, Italian and English, with texts by Jim Dine, Paola Bonani, Francesco Guzzetti, Annalisa Rimmaudo, Claudio Zambianchi and the curator, published by Quodlibet, Macerata.
The exhibition opened on February 11th 2020 and was scheduled to close on June 2nd. Thanks to the generosity of the lenders, it remained open up until July 11th to compensate for the March 8th-May 19th closure imposed throughout Italy by the government, as part of its strategy to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Many of the Dedicato a Jim Dine events scheduled to run live at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni were not able to take place (with the exception of the first two conferences on the calendar, by Clara Tosi Pamphili and Claudio Zambianchi). Digital events were conceived and commissioned in their place.