In Flux
Another productive month for the Studio. Just the way we like it—full of movement and work.
Jim spent the beginning of February in Naples, taking down the “Elysian Fields” exhibition. With over 50,000 visitors it was a real success.
"They are portraits I invented and dreamed up, from history and the ancient world. There are lost friends, figures seen in the woods of Vermont. Plaster is my favorite material because of the way it feels in my hands." Porous, luminous, vulnerable material: in it is condensed the ambiguity of the work, suspended between permanence and dissolution.
“In Elysian Fields, antiquity is not background, but interlocutor: classicism becomes mirror and counter-song of contemporaneity. Dine sculpts as if digging into memory, while curator Vincenzo Trione orchestrates a sober direction, where history is not worshipped, but questioned. Naples, with its vertical topography of epochs and materials, responds as a protagonist.
‘They are monumental and fragile sculptures, and in that fragility, in that tension between transience and permanence, is concentrated the sense of the entire project.’
Art, then, is an act of resistance to time; Naples, once again, is a city capable of making the shadows of the past dialogue with the light of the present.”
Excerpt from:
Jim Dine in Naples: between art and memory along a 'labyrinth' of stratifications, by Giuseppe Fantasia, 9 November 2025
Jim was able to complete the last interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, completing a seven part series, exploring Jim’s work through each of his studios and two exhibitions.
We hope to see this book, published by Steidl, released this summer.
We then visited Rome to explore possibilities for the Spring of 2027 of organizing a show of sculptures and drawings at the Palazzo Venezia, but of course, there are still many details to work out.
Jim spent a very full week in St. Gallen at the Kunstgiesserei working on his next gate sculpture, collaborating with Nathan Federer and Sonja Schuerpf, our two irreplaceable colleagues in Switzerland.
Jim then went to his new studio in New Jersey to work on hand coloring a new three part lithograph of Pinocchio, printed in house with the Master printer Nina Dine.
We are now in Baker City, Oregon, finishing the patina on four new bronze sculptures.
More to come.
