ABOUT JIM DINE

Born in 1935, Jim Dine grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and started his career in the late 1950s in New York with a series of happenings that attracted great attention. In the 1960s, he exhibited his assemblages and first paintings alongside the new generation of pop artists, from Claus Oldenburg to Tom Wesselmann.

Jim Dine has spent the last 60 years traveling the world, sharing his time between various foundries, studios and print workshops, from Göttingen, Germany to New York and Walla-Walla in the U.S. to Saint Gallen, Switzerland. Over the last 50 years, poetry has been at the core of his practice, and he regularly gives readings and performances of his poems.

Jim Dine’s work is featured in over 70 public collections across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, MoMA, Guggenheim, Albertina Museum in Vienna, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The British Museum and Tate Britain in London.

His work has been presented in solo exhibitions around the world including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1967), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (1967 and 1978), the Palais des Beaux-Arts - Bozar in Brussels, Belgium (1970), La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, USA (1974), The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (1988), the Setan Museum of Art & Museum of Art Tokyo & Osaka, Japan (1990), the Borås Konstmuseum Sweden, Switzerland (1993), the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Villa, Malibu, California, USA (2008), The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, USA (2009), the Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada (2010), the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2016), the Antiken Museum, Basel, Switzerland (2016), the Accademia di San Luca, Rome, Italy (2017), the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2018), the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia (2018), the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2020), and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (2020).

In 2023, Jim Dine inaugurated The Stardust House in Göttingen, Germany, a pavilion dedicated to the sculpture, Thru the stardust, the heat on the lawn. This exhibition was followed in June by the exhibition Storm of Memory at the Kunsthaus Göttingen, debuting new sculptures, drawings, prints and books. That same year, Dine also participated in the exhibition, Paravents at the Prada Foundation, as he inaugurated an exhibition of 74 portrait drawings donated to Bowdoin College, Maine, USA.

ABOUT GERHARD STEIDL

Gerhard Steidl is a German printer and publisher. He was born in 1950 in Göttingen, Germany. Steidl developed an interest in the technical aspects of printing from an early age and his impetus for a career in printing came when, as a teenager, one of his photographs was used in a poster advertising a production of Brecht's Mann ist Mann.

In the late 1960s, Steidl established Steidl Verlag in Göttingen. Gerhard Steidl, together with Klaus Staeck worked very closely with Joseph Beuys until his death in 1986. At this point Steidl began to concentrate on publishing photography books. In 1993 he won the Lucky Strike award. He published Karl Lagerfeld and began a 26 yearlong collaboration. In 1998 Steidl met Jim Dine in Paris and since have collaborated on over 30 book projects, ranging from conceptual books like, The Goofy Life of Constant Mourning & Viral Interest, to his latest catalog raisonné of prints, I Print 2000-2020, and recently, Three Ships, which accompanied his exhibition by the same name last September at TEMPLON New York.

The relationship between Gerhard Steidl and Jim Dine has also given birth to dedicated pavilions in Göttingen, Germany; House of Words and Stardust House. These two monumental groups of sculpture combine the many facets of Dine’s oeuvre and Steidl’s acute sense of architecture and scenography, bringing together poetry and large-scale ceramic pots with bronze appliqué. In 2020, Gerhard Steidl received the Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz. Then in 2021, Steidl inaugurated a thirty-year-old dream of opening a Kunsthaus in Göttingen. As its Founding Director, Steidl has curated exhibitions of Roni Horn, William Kentridge, Documenta 17 and Jim Dine’s Storm of Memory. It is for this reason that Kunsthaus Göttingen and Gerhard Steidl were a natural choice to organize Dog on the Forge, the latest opus by Jim Dine, curated by Gerhard Steidl.