Mercredi 07 Janvier 2015 14:43:23 par actuphoto dans Expositions

" I keep photographing tools, because they have been part of my life. But it’s only through photography—not through painting or drawing—that they became a kind of pattern and a topographical study of the world." (Jim Dine, 2014)

The Cologne exhibition features around 80 photographs from the holdings of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur: gelatin silver prints, color prints, and heliogravures that the artist created between 2001 and 2013 on an analog basis. "Jim Dine – My Tools" is the third solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur. It is the only institution in Europe with a large holding of heliogravures as well as black and white and color photographs and is responsible for preserving and exhibiting a major part of his photographic works.

©Jim Dine: The Glass Blower’s Table, 2013
© Jim Dine; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2014

With his "Tools", Jim Dine opens up for us a compelling chapter in his artistic biography, drawing on his lifelong experience with handtools, a motif he has repeatedly taken up in varied media. Dine displays an ongoing fascination with the materiality, form, color, and symbolism of tools and utilitarian objects. They enrich his pictorial cosmos and continually challenge him to reconsider them from new angles. Viewed as individual objects or in various combinations, in everyday use or as part of the process of artistic creation, the tools provide a way for the artist to stage the mundane in an exceptional manner.

©Jim Dine: Red Morandi, 2010
© Jim Dine; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2014

Dine emphasizes in his photographs the poetic aspect and the beauty of the material world. His images thus inspire us to discover the appeal of simple object worlds in our own environment. Vivid yet enigmatic signposts, Dine’s photographs point the way to a stimulating artistic cosmos.

Jim Dine has been working with photography since the 1960s. First, he collected it, working photographic elements into his collages, and he still uses it today as a springboard for his painting. It was not until the 1990s, however, that the artist, famous for his paintings, sculptures, and graphics, began to take up photography as an artistic means of expression, one that in the meantime forms an independent component of his oeuvre.

My Tools
©Jim Dine: Guarding, the Still Life, Remembering the Tree, 2011
© Jim Dine; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2014

A catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition featuring an interview with Jim Dine by Diana Michener and a text by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl. 79 plates, Steidl Verlag.