uzomah ugwu 6/7/23 uzomah ugwu 6/7/23

JIM DINE THREE SHIPS

Three Ships (the Magi), 2022 Bronze | Bronze 284 × 267 × 234 cm — 112 × 105 × 92 in. Photo: © Jim Dine Studio

Jim Dine, the great American artist, is exhibiting his new works at Templon’s new Chelsea space until June 30th of this year.

With the exhibition “Three Ships,” Jim Dine signs a spectacular return to the city of his beginnings. A native of Ohio, Jim Dine moved to New York in 1958. Since his first happenings in the ’60s and his first success as part of the Pop Art generation, Jim Dine has always maintained a close relationship with the city, where he has long kept a studio. Now working between Paris, Walla-Walla, and Göttingen in Germany, he has chosen to unveil some of its most innovative new works for this comeback.

“Three Ships” brings together the production of the past three years: monumental bronze sculptures, rows of intimate self-portraits, and five massive abstract paintings on wood.

Through a clever play of scale and textures, the exhibition stages the obsessions of the artist: his taste for raw material and everyday tools, the artwork conceived as an expression of pure process, the self-portrait as a symbol of the artist’s doubts and relentless quest for beauty. For example, the basement of the gallery creates a dialogue between rare reliefs of tools from 1974, never exhibited before, with a series of pencil drawings made since the pandemic. Realistic and poignantly intimate, they portray the artist as a lucid yet youthful old man. Jim Dine embraces both childhood memories – he often recounts how his first artistic emotions were forged in the family hardware store – and reminiscences of the art history with discreet homages to Roman antiquity or German expressionism.

Both raw and sophisticated, the exhibition demonstrates the vitality of an artist for whom the creative process is the very essence of the work.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Steidl publishes an 89-page fully illustrated catalogue. Designed by the artist, it provides extensive documentation on Jim Dine’s sculptural process and texts by Anne-Claudie Coric, Jim Dine, and Sam Sackeroff.

Drawing the minutes A, 2020-2022

Crayon noir sur papier | Pencil on paper

31 × 23,5 cm — 12 2/8 × 9 1/4 in. Photo: © Jim Dine Studio

Exhibition views Toutes les images / All images: Courtesy the artist and TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York ©️ Charles Roussel.

Jim Dine’s work features in over 70 public collections worldwide, including at the MoMA, Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Collection in London. In 2018, the Centre Pompidou organized a major retrospective of his work which then traveled to the Centre Pompidou Malaga and then the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Another major retrospective was held in Rome by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2020.

In 2021, he inaugurated the Fondation GGL in Montpellier with his largest commissioned work in France: a ceramic ceiling created especially for the 17th-century manor house that is home to the foundation in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres. In the spring of 2023, Dine will inaugurate The Stardust House in Gottingen, Germany, a Pavillon dedicated to the sculpture, Thru the stardust, the heat on the lawn. This exhibition will be followed in June by the exhibition Storm of Memory at the Kunsthaus Gottingen, of new sculptures, prints, and books. In the fall, Dine will participate in the exhibition, Paravents at the Prada Foundation. Later in the fall, Dine will inaugurate an exhibition of portrait drawings donated to Bowdoin College, Maine, USA.

For more information, please visit Templon’s site.

uzomah ugwu 6/4/23 uzomah ugwu 6/4/23

LEE FRIEDLANDER FRAMED BY JOEL COEN

*Sweden,* 2005 gelatin silver print © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen is an exhibition of Friedlander’s photographs curated by the widely acclaimed filmmaker at the Fraenkel Gallery.

Rather than focusing on a single subject or period, Coen’s selection concentrates on Friedlander’s singular approach to composition. Through the approximately 45 images in the exhibition, Coen surveys the range of Friedlander’s 60+ year career, bringing many lesser-known images into the equation. The selection evidences an unexpected affinity between Friedlander and Coen, whose work explores the sly power of images. A new hardcover publication, with an introduction by Coen and an afterword by the actor Frances McDormand, accompanies the exhibition.

*Los Angeles,* 1967 gelatin silver print © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Friedlander, Coen, and McDormand, long admirers of each other’s work, met in the spring of 2022 at Friedlander’s home in Rockland County, New York. During the day-long visit, the artists studied hundreds of photographs, ultimately leading to the selection that constitutes the book and exhibition.

I was present when these two guys met for the first time and observed a familiarity that comes from their lifetimes of singular and eccentric visions… Neither would naturally refer to himself as an Artist. Yet they have honed their crafts over decades of practice, and those of us who cannot see the way they see have no other way to describe what they do but “art.”

—from the afterword by Frances McDormand

Coen’s selection focuses on dense and off-kilter photographs, often bisected by stop signs and utility poles, car doors, windshields, trees, and shadows. “As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing, and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions,” Coen writes.