Jim Dine: Birds

This Limited Special Edition comes with an original print. A childhood encounter with a crow at a zoo led to a lifetime fascination with avian life for the American artist Jim Dine. This encounter with the bird was perceived by the young Dine with a mixture of fear, fascination, and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world, and from it grew a mythic symbolism for the artist, which he explores in Birds, a series of remarkable black-and-white photographs. Here, an everyday, unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythology, as a jester at the medieval court, as a strange messenger from a world behind the scenes. These are rich, intimate, darkly detailed images imbued with symbolism and meaning. They are also beautiful and compelling, particularly as published in this spectacular volume, which, with 36 images printed using a technique called heliogravure, and with a Japanese binding, is a truly beautiful object in itself, and reveals a new aspect of the work of American artist Jim Dine.

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati in 1935 and made his entrance into the New York art world in the late 1950s. His paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture have since been shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Dine has taught art at Yale, Oberlin and Cornell.