On the occasion of the inauguration of the GGL Foundation, the American artist Jim Dine presents the Renaissance exhibition.

Faire danser le plafond (Making the ceiling dance), a ceramic ceiling created by Jim Dine for the entrance porch of the hotel, is a set of 105 hearts declined as if towards infinity. It is the artist’s largest public work in France to date. Very attached to France, where he has had a studio for almost 40 years, Jim Dine developed this project in close collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres which, for the occasion, developed new colors that corresponded exactly to the painter’s wishes. In dialogue with this exceptional commission, which took more than three years to see the light of day, the Renaissance exhibition proposes to shed light on some of the artist’s obsessions: the heart motif, repetition, the color palette as language.

A leading artist of American Pop Art, like Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine has distinguished himself by his repurposing of everyday objects, the use of words written on canvas or the use of bright and offbeat blocks of color. From the beginning, the heart shape appeared in his work, merging with that of a palette. Over time, emancipating himself from Pop, Jim Dine has traced his own path, where the heart and other key motifs such as the Venus de Milo, the dressing gown or tools all become his favorite subjects. Repeated, metamorphosed, freed of any narrative intent, these subjects become the basis of a clean and intimate language. They act as forms of self-portraits or symbols of the act of creation.

Through the subtle confrontation of some thirty works, Numa Hambursin, artistic director of the foundation, weaves unexpected formal links. Bronze sculptures, relief, paintings on the verge of abstraction, assemblages, engravings of great technical virtuosity: this retrospective, poetic journey shows the diversity of Jim Dine’s abundant production from the 1970s to the present day.