Jim Dine

"I always need to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist… I need that hook… something to hang my landscape on."

Jim Dine, 1984

Hearts, robes and tools are the subjects most closely associated with the work of Jim Dine, and indeed during the 1960s and the 1970s these were the principal obsessive images t which he returned again and again. It would be a disservice to the artist, however, to continue to view his production in terms of such a limited number of subjects, since over the past twenty years he has considerably widened his range.

The most important categories include his wife, Nancy, the Venus de Milo, hands, skulls and most recently the fictional character of Pinocchio. It is a measure of Dine's devotion to printmaking as a medium of equal importance to any other that all of these subjects have found a place in his graphic work.

The Alan Cristea Gallery is exhibiting examples of these and other subjects which Dine consistently uses and reworks, to form a unique overview of the artist's printmaking activity over the last 35 years.