The Grammar of Jim Dine

One of the most recognizable of American artists, often associated with Pop art, and one of America's most innovative printmakers, Jim Dine has created a multidisciplinary oeuvre tied together by a continued use and reinvention of familiar imagery. Tools, Bathrobe, Heart, that respectively appeared in the 1960s, Venus de Milo (first broached in 1980s) and Pinocchio (emerging at the end of the 1990s) are amongst the most famous motifs that are being repeatedly represented in isolation as well as in combination throughout the six decades long career of Jim Dine. These motifs have been explored in many media, from painting to sculpture, from assemblage to collage, but moreover investigated through all the techniques of printing, with different papers, sizes and printmakers.

The current exhibition, that gathered about 200 works from Jordan D. Schnitzer family foundation, invites the visitor to explore the evolution of the motifs as well as a deep dive into the world of print making techniques as there are being twisted by Jim Dine and the printmakers he had been collaborating with. The presentation of the works produced in this exhibition follows the discovery of the different techniques by the artist, from the early Tools lithographic works realized in 1962 to the ever-expanding production happening in the second part of the 1960s, after his first trip to London and the publication of his Tool portfolio.

“In 1967, I was not painting, but I was printing all the time; everyday I was printing. Because in the first place, I was tired of being alone. I am a very good collaborator. I enjoy it. and printing is a sociable thing to do. You hang out with the printers, you have a good time, you talk, you change. And I was getting a lot of ideas. And the printmaking informs everything. I mean, they all inform each other. for me, it is all the same”.

The exhibition, in addition to looking into how each motif has been migrating from a medium to another, will showcase grouping of works produced during the most pivotal collaborations of Jim Dine with master printers: Aldo Crommelynck, Toby Mitchell, Robert Townsend but also his production with Tamarind Press.

More than a painter who makes prints, Jim Dine is a true printmaker. He does not consider printmaking to be a reproduction exercise but a practice with its won inherent requirements, rules, advantages, and traditions.