CHICAGO, IL.- Richard Gray Gallery announces two coordinated exhibitions of work by the acclaimed American artist Jim Dine. In Chicago, Looking at the Present examines Dine’s recent large-scale paintings. In New York, Primary Objects presents work from a formative period in Dine’s practice, focusing on his mixed material paintings and sculptures from 1961 through 1965.

A two volume exhibition catalogue will document both exhibitions and will feature contributions by Hamza Walker, LAXART Executive Director, and Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art.

CHICAGO
Looking at the Present inaugurates Richard Gray Gallery’s new converted warehouse space at 2044 West Carroll Avenue.

The exhibition reveals the development of new directions in Dine’s painting practice. Shedding the iconography of hearts, robes, and the Venus de Milo that has animated his visual language for decades, Dine’s recent work depicts elusive imagery that emerges and recedes in masses of layered, gestural marks. Some of the works, such as Coming from the Darkness I Hear Your Laugh! (2016), step away from figurative depiction altogether, whereas others, like The Funny Pleasures of War (2015-16), bring in fragments of the human body or iconographic symbols like the skull. The silhouette of the artist’s head is a recurring icon in the paintings, a device that Dine uses to merge self-portraiture with his study of surface, texture and paint itself.

In most of these paintings, Dine has built up a heavy impasto surface. By mixing sand into the acrylic paint, he has developed a process in which he is continuously revising his own work. In the studio, Dine moves between building up layers of gritty paint and blasting them away with power sanders and other tools. The exhibition is made up of large-scale and multi-panel canvases. The largest, Errant Rays and Seeds Escaping (2015-16) measures nearly nineteen feet in width and loosely depicts bodies coalescing and fragmenting amid vividly pigmented impasto.

NEW YORK
In conjunction with Looking at the Present, the exhibition Primary Objects: Jim Dine in the 1960s at Richard Gray Gallery, New York examines Dine’s work from 1960 through 1965. It opened on Tuesday, May 2.

This exhibition focuses on a formative time in Jim Dine’s early career when his painting and drawing practice was colliding with everyday objects like crowbars, hammers, tuxedos, shower fixtures, lamps, and windows. Returning to the years immediately following his move to New York City in 1958, the exhibition illustrates the ways Dine incorporated household objects––often loaded with autobiographical import––into his paintings and sculptures as extensions of and metaphors for the human body.

Imbued with action, the works in the exhibition also have a presence beyond their frames. In some cases, daily objects seamlessly become part of the work’s narrative as with Four Rooms, a four panel work depicting domestic spaces. Here a curtain rod and showerhead applied to the canvas coalesce with the painted stream of water represented in one panel. In other works, objects are incorporated forcefully as with Window With An Axe (1961-62) or given purpose, as with The Chrome Lite. The Silverpoint Jacket (1964) where a standing lamp faces and illuminates the surface of the painting. In his interview with Hamza Walker in the exhibition catalogue, Dine describes these works as embodiments of a desire to “venerate these objects, common objects and how beautiful I felt they were.”

Jim Dine (b. 1935, Cincinnati, Ohio) arrived in New York City in 1958 and rose quickly to prominence for his role in creating the first “Happenings” with Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras and others. Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School, and he received his BFA from Ohio University, Athens.

Dine’s extensive practice in painting, drawing, sculpting and printmaking has been the subject of more than 300 solo exhibitions around the world, including ten major surveys and retrospectives since 1970. These include I Never Look Away (2016), a retrospective of Dine’s self-portraiture at the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Jim Dine (2011), the first retrospective of the artist’s sculpture at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids; Drawings of Jim Dine (2004), a major traveling survey organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Jim Dine: Walking Memory (1999), a career retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Jim Dine: Five Themes (1984-85), a traveling survey organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, which traveled to the Phoenix Art Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Akron Art Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and a 1970 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

More than 70 international public collective hold Jim Dine’s work, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture