Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002
Akron Art Museum
January 17 – March 27, 2004
Ohio-born sculptor, painter and printmaker JIM DINE is one of America’s most famous living artists. Since the 1960s, Dine has transformed familiar, everyday objects such as hearts, bathrobes, tools, owls and skulls into powerful symbols of loss, longing, joy and wonder. The Akron Art Museum presents forty-seven monumental prints by this legendary artist with Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002.
Born in Cincinnati in 1935, Jim Dine took evening art classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later graduated from Ohio University. In 1958 he moved to New York City where he created performance art pieces, paintings and sculptures that incorporate real-life objects such as tools, lawnmowers and showerheads. Unlike the Pop artists with whom he is often associated, Dine does not use popular imagery to be humorous or ironic. Instead, he depicts objects that hold deep personal significance for him and conceives of each work as a kind of self-portrait.
Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 features the artist’s signature motifs of bathrobes, hearts, hands, and the Venus de Milo, themes the artist has recast in inventive ways since 1985. In conjunction with the exhibition, Dine’s Painting Around Mount Zion, a monumental image of four bathrobes owned by the Akron Art Museum, is also on view. The exhibition also features some of his newest subjects such as owls, ravens, trees and the character of Pinocchio, reflecting a more brooding, romantic sensibility.
Over the past four decades, Jim Dine has produced an incomparable body of paintings, sculpture, photographs and prints. Dine recently completed a monumental bronze sculpture of the Venus de Milo for the US Courthouse in Cleveland. Called Cleveland Venus, it was installed atop the new building this past October.
The works in the Akron Art Museum exhibition reveal Dine’s expressive vision as well as his devotion to innovative printmaking techniques. The artist uses power tools to carve images into printing plates, combines multiple techniques within a single print and hand colors many works, using brushes, his fingers and even a straw broom. Like his paintings and sculptures, Dine’s prints are characterized by both technical virtuosity and emotional intensity. They are grand in scale, extraordinary in technique and rich in allusion, with a powerful visual and emotional impact not to be missed.
This exhibition was organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in collaboration with Pace Editions Inc. and Jim Dine.
AKRON ART MUSEUM
70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308
