Opening: January 17, 6-8 pm

Exhibition dates: January 18 - February 28, 2026

Opening times: Mon-Sat, 11 am - 7 pm

Address: Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31A, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

Taymour Grahne Projects is delighted to announce, ‘Found and Lost’, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Iowa City-based artist John Dilg opening on January 17.

Over the decades, American artist John Dilg has distilled scenic panoramas into earth-toned paintings that feel immediately familiar yet poignantly dreamlike. His style is deceptively simple, his line fluid, expressive. Having specialised in abstraction early in his career, Dilg’s gradual evolution towards landscape painting retained an especial awareness of spatial relationships, a consciousness of the physical and allusory weight of forms and structures. His landscapes transcend scenery, becoming a lexicon of objects, each powerfully charged with memory and meaning. Dilg’s paintings are wonderfully contemplative spaces, where solitude and recognition coexist, evoking our shared longing for meaning within nature's vastness.

Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1945, John Dilg took a B.F.A. in Painting and Filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design, before winning a Fulbright scholarship to India. He taught at the University of Iowa, retiring in 2017 as Professor Emeritus at the School of Art and Art History. Today, his home studio is in Iowa City where he works daily, completing a painting a month, or when the canvases are being especially ‘co-operative’, three in two months.

‘Found and Lost’ is the latest body of work from Dilg’s world – a place where seascapes, woods, waterfalls, islands, icebergs and lone trees harmonise within wide open scenes. A pair of eyes peers up from a tree trunk, a solitary bear sits on a beach. The paintings reflect the artist’s profound awe at the natural world’s endless potential to challenge and inspire. As Dilg himself says:

‘‘Found and Lost’ continues a theme I have recently identified. Quite literally, the (so-called) “New World” was found and is now being lost through the wilfully careless denial of deadly environmental changes.’

The muted hues of his works, veering between loamy earth tones to moonlit bodies of water are redolent of faded maps or archival geological illustrations. Working in oils, charcoal, and graphite, Dilg works deep down into the canvas itself, like a man working the soil, allowing the rough warp and weft of the fabric to become an active part of the final piece. He diligently draws and paints, layering up surfaces across scumbled surfaces. As a result, each painting carries a sense of time: layers accumulate, marks shift, and the granular surfaces and soft tonal atmospheres create a quiet but persistent depth.

‘The presence of charcoal and graphite allows drawing to remain as a presence throughout,’ says Dilg. ‘Edges to the forms are present as well as increasing or decreasing the forms when the paint coalesces with the line elements.’

Works such as Mistletoe (2025) and Guardians (2024) exemplify this delicate control of precision and softness. Trees are clearly outlined yet mutable, as if glimpsed through fog or recollected long after the fact. The artist’s fascination with souvenirs of an experience or a moment in time, comes to the fore time and again in works such as these.

Dilg’s initial idea typically begins by spotting an image – in a newspaper, online, in old magazines – something that triggers the artist, like ‘a car battery, used to jump-start my thinking about the structure of a next painting’. But Dilg never replicates a scene. Rather, he zooms in on a specific part of the image, an element or a detail that especially fires his curiosity. Inspiration ignited, the artist proceeds to painstakingly extrapolate his narrative from trees, water, moons, geological phenomena.

This approach results in landscapes that are never merely descriptive. They are symbolic containers, carrying memory and meaning. Acting as meditative portals, they invite us to consider our own relationships with landscape, time and remembrance. Take Iceberg (2025) for instance, where a monumental glacier floats in the sea, observed by a lone, hazy bear. It’s an encounter rendered with the simplicity of a folk tale yet weighted with ecological resonance. Or Peace and the Source (2025), wherein a winding, luminous river cuts through a mountain range, its stillness suggesting both origin and passage. Bonneville (2025) depicts a waterfall, the cascading sheet of water rendered in rhythmic, vertical strokes, creating a joyously musical sense of repetition.

‘I like the way water is shaped by its container,’ the artist comments. ‘In this sense, a pond or small lake can have more meaning than the ocean’.

‘Found and Lost’ is positively awash with water, in waterfalls, ponds, streams, lakes and rivers. ‘Water, in certain forms, can be a vehicle for memory’ Dilg avers. His curiosity with water’s innate movement has even inspired his own large collection of amateur waterfall paintings, driven by a fascination to understand the disparate means painters will use in depicting waterfalls. ‘Waterfalls have a character and even a personality when the water is falling’.

Throughout ‘Found and Lost’, the artist’s long-standing interest in American vernacular traditions - particularly the aesthetics of Midwestern folk art and the textures of local craft - remains palpable. Full moons, for example, are a recurring motif. While folk artists have traditionally used a full moon, or moonlight to serve as a symbolic bridge between the natural and the supernatural, Dilg’s moons also serve a practical function within his compositions.

‘The moon is a prime romantic element,’ he says. ‘Moonlight in a picture is equal to the sounds of narration; its presence can conjure a mood. I especially enjoy adding the element of a moon and experiencing the (often) dramatic way it will determine the mood and meaning of a painting. In a more quotidian measure, placing the moon ‘just so’ in a painting is similar to a period, ending a sentence’.

Hope (2025) and Driftwood (2025) portray stumps or carved trunks as solemn sentinels,

vessels of loss, yet also promise. These forms echo the exhibition’s title: what is found is often what once seemed lost, and what is lost may linger in symbolic traces. This theme flourishes in pieces such as Odilia in the Woods (2025) where Dilg adds a tease of Surrealism, with two

eyes peering from a tree stump. ‘St. Odilia is the Catholic patron saint of eyesight,’ he says. ‘Ste-Odile is the place of her burial – and I am told Odile is the source of my surname’.

The exhibition’s works on paper, including As It Might Have Looked (2025), Copper Canyon (2025), and Eternal (2025), deepen this thematic interplay, with delicate pencil lines heightening the sense of impermanence. These are visions that might shift or dissolve at any moment, like memories revisited under changing light.

Today, Dilg’s work feels more resonant than ever. Amid global uncertainty and ecological precarity, his work offers viewers not escapism, but a gentle, persistent invitation: Look closely. Remember deeply. And rediscover the quiet places - real or imagined - where we first learned what it means to feel at home in the world.

John Dilg (born 1945) is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, vernacular artifacts, folk art and art historical sources.

Dilg was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1945 and spent his childhood in the Chicago-area with summers in rural Iowa. He earned a BFA degree in painting and filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design in 1969 and studied at the Lalit Kala Akademi in India (1971–2) through a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1973, during a Yaddo artist residency, he met artist and future mentor Byron Burford, who recruited him to teach at the University of Iowa. Dilg was a professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa for over four decades, before retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2017. In addition to his teaching career at the University of Iowa, Dilg has been a visiting artist at more than forty institutions, including the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence College, Stanford University, and Yale University.

Since 2000, Dilg has had solo exhibitions at the Figge Art Museum and Rhodes College (Memphis), and galleries including Galerie Eva Presenhuber (New York/Vienna, 2021–3), Regina Rex and Luise Ross (2000–11) in New York, Taymour Grahne (London/New York), Steven Zevitas (Boston), Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles), Devening Projects (Chicago), National Exemplar (Iowa City), and Schmidt Contemporary Art (St. Louis).

His work belongs to the public collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Figge Art Museum, Illinois State University, Museu d'Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni (Spain), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Birmingham Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, and Stanley Museum of Art. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation and Yaddo Foundation, and received a Fulbright Grant.

John Dilg lives in Iowa City, and is married to Jan Weissmiller, poet and owner of Prairie Lights Books.