American
b. 1935, Cincinnati, Ohio
Based in New York, New York and Walla Walla, Washington

Jim Dine is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, performance artist, stage designer and poet. His best known works are paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict and expressively interpret common images and objects.

Dine’s paintings of the 1960s favored clothing and domestic objects that featured motifs including ties, shoes and bathroom items such as basins, showers and toothbrushes. Other interests were elements of his own profession such as palettes, paint-boxes and brushes, and also a variety of tools, which he regarded as extensions of the hand. As early as 1964 he employed the image of a man’s dressing gown that he borrowed from a newspaper advertisement, as the recurring symbol for a self-portrait.

Other images including a valentine heart, the iconic Venus de Milo, a gnarled tree and a wrought-iron gate were reintroduced in so many guises over the years as to become personal trademarks. Through a process of exploration and reinvention, the common image has lost its place in the public domain and has been stamped exclusively with the Dine’s artist signature, while also communicating a range of emotional and aesthetic intentions.

Dine was part of a performance art group in the 1960’s Happenings era and was linked with the POP art movement through his use of subjects from everyday life. However, he was at odds with Pop’s deadpan style and with later movements of pure abstraction, Minimalism and conceptual art. In the late 1970s and 1980s he became viewed as a forerunner of the resurgence in figurative and Neo-Expressionist trends.

Jim Dine often visits print shops and foundries and has set up dozens of temporary studios in cities all over the USA and Europe in order to focus on special projects or to prepare exhibitions. His Walla Walla, Washington residence came about in large part due to the outstanding production skills of the now internationally renowned Walla Walla Foundry. Dine’s artworks have been exhibited and collected internationally by major museums and individuals since the early 1960’s.