Jim Dine: My Words & Pinocchio

PIBI Gallery is pleased to present _My Words & Pinocchio_, a solo exhibition by Jim Dine, on view from May 28 through July 4, 2026. The exhibition marks Dine’s first solo presentation at the gallery since debuting new works at Frieze Seoul 2025 as a represented artist and offers a focused engagement with his most recent practice. Widely regarded as a defining figure in contemporary American art, Jim Dine has forged a singular artistic vision across painting, drawing, sculpture, poetry, photography, performance, and printmaking over the course of more than six decades. Although his work is perhaps best known for its recurring cast of familiar images and symbols, including hearts and bathrobes, the present exhibition turns its attention to the acts of writing and drawing that underline his practice, bringing together a new body of work rooted in these foundational gestures. _My Words & Pinocchio_ features eight new Pinocchio drawings, a sculptural work, poem drawings derived from the artist’s own poems, and a wall drawing created in situ. Rather than elucidating the meaning of Dine’s symbolic imagery, the exhibition foregrounds the processes through which images are constructed, altered, and continually reconfigured across the surface. Across drawing, sculpture, and wall drawing alike, Dine’s signature iconography resists simple repetition. Instead, it unfolds through continual variation, with each recurrence emerging as a renewed and transformed iteration. At the heart of the exhibition is the Pinocchio Drawing series. The familiar figure, a curious protagonist transformed through failure and experience in a well-known tale, returns in Dine’s hands as something equally unresolved. In Dine’s drawings, Pinocchio never appears as a fully resolved form, but remains suspended in an ongoing process of transformation and renewal. Layered, erased, and redrawn, the brushstrokes gradually coax new forms to the surface, and at times the figure seems to pause in a state of incompletion. Elsewhere, facial features dissolve into indistinction or the lower body disappears altogether, keeping Pinocchio poised not as a finished image but as a figure still in the process of formation. As such, Dine’s Pinocchio is not represented as a fully constituted being; rather, it is held on the picture plane in a state of becoming, retaining a latent potentiality that is actualized through the process of brushstrokes. At the center of the exhibition space stands _LIAR(2ND VERSION)_, a monumental Pinocchio sculpture approximately 180 cm in height and 130 cm in width. Moving between the drawings and the sculpture, viewers are invited to consider how the same subject is perceived and interpreted differently across distinct media. The processes of revision and repetition evident in the _Pinocchio Drawing_ series extend into the _Poem Drawing_ works. Poetry has long held a central place in Dine’s artistic practice. Over the past fifty years, he has published more than twelve collections of poetry and expanded the relationship between language and visual art through regular readings and performances. In the new _Poem Collage Drawing_ and _Wall Drawing_ works presented in this exhibition, writing functions less as the act of completing a coherent sentence than as a generative process of rearranging paper, letterforms, blank space, and overlapping surfaces. For example, in _Everybodies Song_, the artist repeatedly writes, erases, and overwrites lines while tearing, collaging, and reassembling fragments of paper. In this way, text moves beyond its communicative role to become a plastic element in its own right, and the residue of erasure and correction remains embedded in the composition. In the _Poem Drawing_ works, poetry does not remain confined to language meant simply to be read; recomposed across the pictorial field, it emerges as a form of ‘visual poetry.’ Jim Dine’s artistic world has been shaped around a constellation of autobiographical icons such as hearts, bathrobes, Pinocchio, and palettes. Yet these recurring motifs are never allowed to turn into fixed signs. Rather, Dine continually renews and revises them through repetition and variation. Jim Dine’s solo exhibition at PIBI Gallery titled _My Words & Pinocchio_ illuminates how the artist’s signature symbols and language acquire new form within the picture plane and across space, and how the acts of ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’ intertwine to bring figure and surface into being. With this exhibition, PIBI Gallery offers viewers in Korea a deeper and more expansive encounter with Jim Dine’s practice, and reaffirms its ongoing commitment to presenting major bodies of work and new developments from across the artist’s oeuvre.