Jim Dine
49 Views on the North Crescent
Opening on Thursday, October 8, from 6 PM to 8 PM
Exhibition from October 9 to November 15, 2026
Yvon Lambert presents “49 Views on the North Crescent”, a new exhibition by Jim Dine dedicated to a place deeply tied to his memory: North Crescent, a street in Cincinnati where the artist spent the early years of his childhood with his grandparents.
Born in Cincinnati in 1935, Jim Dine is one of the leading figures of postwar American art. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, assemblage, and poetry, his body of work has been built around a vocabulary of recurring objects and motifs: tools, hearts, garments, plants, and bodies, to which he has continually returned over the decades. Though often associated with Pop Art, Dine stands apart through a deeply personal, autobiographical, and material practice, in which repetition becomes a means of accumulating experience.
With “49 Views on the North Crescent” Dine revisits one of his earliest internal landscapes. He arrived there as a baby and lived with his grandparents until the age of three. From this period, he retains exceptionally vivid memories: the light, the trees, the shadows, the house, the objects, and the people around him. Most importantly, it was there that he discovered his grandfather’s tools, which served as his toys at the time and would, years later, become a central motif in his work.
“My toys were my grandfather’s tools. I just had a lovely time.”
North Crescent is therefore not the subject of a documentary representation here, but rather a place preserved in the artist’s memory, a location to which he returns through drawing.
The 49 panels that make up the exhibition are executed on vintage offset printing plates, worked with charcoal and pencil. Originally designed to mechanically reproduce an image, these surfaces become unique pieces in Dine’s hands.
The number 49 gives the series its title. Each panel is a variation on the same place, the same memory. Brought together in the gallery space, the 49 drawings form a single work, in which repetition and variation serve as the vehicles for recalling memory.
Here, drawing finds an extension in poetry, another essential aspect of Dine’s practice. Two publications will be released simultaneously by Yvon Lambert Éditions: “ZOO,” a poem accompanied by selfportraits, to be published in the Pli selon Pli collection, and “Papa Dear” a collection of ten poems written in a single burst during the summer of 2026 and translated by Vincent Broqua, to be published in the Îlots collection.