Jim Dine: Last Year's Forgotten Harvest, organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art,  represents the first exhibition to focus on Dine’s portrayal of his family and friends. Featuring more than fifty works—donated by Dine to the Museum—spanning a period from 1957 to the present, the show also examines Dine’s deep engagement with drawing, his technique of choice for portraiture. Dine observes: “Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life.” The metaphor is explicit in his portraits. Often working over extended periods, Dine creates powerful analogies between the materiality of his likenesses and the subject depicted. Distressed and collaged paper evokes human skin and the imprint of experience and emotion upon the face. Dine’s commitment to precision—to an ongoing process of erasure and reworking made visible to the viewer—endows each page with evidence of movement, of breath, of lives lived. In short, through Dine’s portraiture, we observe the ongoing presence of a past that exerts its power upon the artist and upon his audience.

Jim Dine: Last Year's Forgotten Harvest is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by Jim Dine and Anne Collins Goodyear, published by Steidl.

Sponsors:

The exhibition is supported by the Becker Fund for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Image Credit:

Portrait of Aldo Crommelnyck, 2008, watercolor, charcoal, and with pastel over hard ground and soft ground etching, by Jim Dine.  Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Gift of the Artist.