The Palazzo delle Esposizioni presents one of the greatest players in American art, a man whose radical and innovative work had such a major impact on contemporary visual culture, particularly on the Italian visual culture of the 1960s.
This sweeping anthological retrospective, devoted to the work of Jim Dine (Cincinnati, USA, 1935), has been produced in close cooperation with the artist himself and curated by Daniela Lancioni.
The exhibition will be showcasing over 60 works dated 1959 to 2016, coming from public and private collections both in Europe and in the United States. An exhaustive iconographical apparatus will convey a visual memory of the famous Happenings accompanied by a narrative in Jim Dine's own voice. And a selection of video interviews will allow visitors to draw closer to the figure of this great artist.
Yet desite his popularity, Jim Dine continues to be an artist who is difficult to pigeonhole with any precision, chiefly on account of his aspiration to independence and of his refusal to identify with any of the categories devised by the art critics, by art history or by the art market. The autonomy and freedom with which he has always addressed the panorama of ascertained values is exemplary, as we can see from the story of his life and from his work that clings so tenaciously to his peronal experience, an "uneducated" and "worrying" experience as it has occasionally been defined.
A major part of the exhibition will consist of the works that Jim Dine donated in 2017 to the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre George Pompidou in Paris which has, in turn, very generously loaned those works to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni for this occasion.
The exhibition will also be showcasing a considerable number of historic works loaned by private and public European collections such as the Museo di Ca' Pesaro in Venice and the MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (both these museums are lending works from the Sonnabend Collection), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz.
A selection of works will be coming over from the United States, including the two famous 1960s paintings entitled A Black Shovel. Number 2 (1962) and Long Island Landscape (1963) from the collections of the Whitney Museum in New York, together with Shoe dated 1961 and The Studio (Landscape Painting) dated 1963, both of which the artist entered in the Venice Biennale of 1964.

mpefm ITALY art press release