Jim Dine

Jim Dine - Dutch Hearts

Biography of the Artist: Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati (United States). He studied contemporary art at Ohio University (1953-1957). He settles in New York in 1958 where he makes, the same year, his first "happenings". His first personal exhibition took place two years later. From the beginning of his artistic career, Jim Dine pursues the themes that will become recurrent, the self-portrait, the body, memory; the artist undertakes this personal search in painting, mixed media, sculpture, drawing and other media. The artist's work is narrative and autobiographical. In 1962, Jim Dine participated in "New Realism", an exhibition that consecrated Pop Art. In the 1960s, his work presents a mythology of the everyday with tools, clothes, hearts, which are "like a vocabulary of feelings". From 1970, settled for a time in London, he painted a series of canvases and works on paper, on the theme of the heart, then on the theme of bathrobes. In the 1980s, Dine mixed faces, landscapes, skulls and huge red hearts on diptychs or triptychs. He makes wooden statues of primitive characters, which he pierces with objects in the manner of vodou witches in witchcraft ceremonies. He makes installations of statues of old masters that he has painted to pay ironic homage to the history of sculpture. In the last decade, Jim Dine, uses photography to "access his unconscious in an immediate way", experiments with digital printing, heliogravure and chromophotographic development. Jim Dine wants his compositions to be like "daydreams". He produces an important graphic work: Prints, lithographs, serigraphs, monotypes, posters and drawings. Jim Dine lives and works between Paris and New York.