Who is Jim Dine?

Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935) is an American contemporary artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s play a part includes painting, drawing, printmaking (in many forms including lithographs, etchings, gravure, intaglio, woodcuts, letterpress and linocuts), sculpture and photography; his before works encompassed assemblage and happenings, while in recent years his poetry output, both in publications and readings, has increased.

Dine has been united with numerous art movements throughout his career including Neo-Dada (use of collage and found objects), Abstract Expressionism (the gestural nature of his painting), and Pop Art (affixing mysterious objects including tools, rope, articles of clothing and even a bathroom sink) to his canvases, yet he has actively avoided such classifications. At the core of his art, regardless of the medium of the specific work, lies an intense process of autobiographical reflection, a relentless exploration and criticism of the self through a number of terribly personal motifs which include: the heart, the bathrobe, tools, antique sculpture, and the setting of Pinocchio (among flora, skulls, birds and symbolic self-portraits). Dine’s entrance is all-encompassing, incorporating his entire lived experience: “Dine’s art has a stream of consciousness environment to its evolution, and is based on everything aspects of his life—what he is reading, objects he comes upon in souvenir shops on the order of the world, a omnipotent study of art from every time and place that he understands as subconscious useful to his own practice.”

Dine’s art has been the subject of higher than 300 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1984–85), Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2011) and Museum Folkwang, Essen (2015–16). His feign is held in surviving collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Dine’s distinctions count his nomination as a fanatic of the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York (1980), Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003), the British Museum Medal (2015) following his donation of 234 prints to the museum in 2014, membership of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (2017), and Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (2018).