Jim Dine

Biography

After graduating from Ohio University in 1957 with a B.F.A. degree, Jim Dine (b. 1935) began his career with five happenings in the early 1960s during the Pop Art movement in New York. However he returned to painting retaining a theatrical quality in his work in the dramatic placement of actual objects, either attached to the painted surface or placed before it to set up an interaction among the elements. Although he has been called a pop artist, his aesthetic is far more within the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, Dada and Neo-Surrealists. The objects he uses are either personal, such as his own clothes, or newly purchased, as in the case of new shovels or wrenches. Nor is the object presented as an entity; instead, Dine places it within a painterly environment that has personal connotations for him. In the mid-sixties, he made a number of free-standing cast aluminum and, in the following decade, he began producing works in series, representing three-dimensional objects such as the robe, tools, or heart that have become his own icons. In the 1980s, his interest in objects evolved towards the creation of sculpture.

Among Dine's numerous public commissions is Looking Toward the Avenue fro 1989, three bronze versions of the Venus de Milo outside the Credit Lyonnais Building on the Avenue of the Americas between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Jim Dine's work is included in numerous international public collections including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humelbeak, Denmark; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Gallery, London.