Jim Dine

Tools have been among Jim Dine's favorite motifs since his beginnings as an artist, and are a passion born in his childhood, when his grandfather and later his father ran a hardware store in Cincinnati. My Tools provides new insight into Dine's ongoing photographic exploration of this multifaceted theme. In large-format black-and-white and color photographs, as well as heliogravures produced between 2001 and 2014, he explores the formal vocabulary of individual objects, their materials, as well as their collective constellations and surrounding spaces. Dine defines himself as an artist through the tools and objects he creates with his own hands. His analog photographs-themselves creations of a complex tool, the camera-are both true to the objective appearance of his tools, while opening up our field of imagination.