Jim Dine American, b. 1935

Jim Dine is an American painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and poet who emerged during the Pop Art period as an innovative creator of works that combine the painted canvas with ordinary objects of daily life. Dine studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School, and received his B.F.A. from Ohio University, Athens, where he was also enrolled in the graduate program. Dine moved to New York in 1959 where he became a key figure in the Happenings movement. His talent was quickly recognized, leading to his first solo exhibition was held at the Reuben Gallery, New York in 1960.

Although Dine’s prominence in the New York art scene led him to befriend Pop Art figures including Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, his works strayed from the traditional subjects typically associated with that movement. Instead, the everyday objects Dine incorporates into his art are often personal possessions, lending a powerful sense of autobiography to his works. His subjects have included plants, animals, figures, puppets, and self-portraits, and his iconic depictions of hearts, tools, and robes have become the hallmark of his oeuvre.

Over the past five decades, Dine has created a wide breadth of work: drawings, works on paper, paintings, assemblages, and sculpture. Dine has been given solo exhibitions at museums throughout Europe and the United States, including a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1999, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2004. In 1971 Jim Dine produced the first paintings in which a large heart appears on its own, a device to which he has since returned both on canvas and at regular intervals in his graphic work. It has served him for almost as many reasons as he needs for making art: as a formal device, as a stand-in for the body, as a sexual image, and an emblem of romance, and as a sign of erotic love and desire...The advantages, particularly with such a simple shape, were many: it was impossible to forget, graphically arresting, sufficiently neutral to support a variety of associations, and so flexible as a container for an infinite range of marks, colors and other images that it was unlikely ever to outlive its usefulness. It has certainly continued pumping life into Dine's paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures more than thirty years on.