Arcadia Art Consultancy is pleased to announce Untitled (1992) by Jim Dine (b. 1935) is now available in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries Auction. The auction will close on October 2 at 12:00 PM EDT, with a pre-sale estimate of $50,000–$70,000.
In Untitled, Jim Dine infuses the repeated saccharine symbols of hearts with frenzied energy through a bold jewel-like color palette and gestural paint application. While first glance affords an immediate connection to the universal form of a hyperbolized red heart, close inspection reveals a surface composed of layered gestures evoking a painterly palimpsest.
Throughout his six-decade-long career and stylistic evolutions from Pop assemblagist to painterly expressionist, Dine has continually explored recurrent motifs, namely tools, robes, Venus de Milo and hearts. While some symbols have witnessed only a fleeting presence in his repertoire, such as gates and trees, the heart represents one of the artist’s most long standing and powerful emblems. The origins of his devotion to the shape trace back to his experience constructing the set for the San Francisco Actor's Workshop’s 1965 production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. It was during this project that he determined the resonance of the heart stating, “It struck a chord with me…It seemed to me like a universal symbol. And it doesn't mean just for love. Because in a certain way it is an abstraction of a lot of things. It's a human form and its pushing interpretation if you say that a human heart looks like this, but this does come from the idea of a human heart.” (Jim Dine, quoted in Exh. Cat., Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959–1969, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999, p. 208)
However, it is within Dine’s very consistent commitment to the heart motif that we find his ceaseless innovation. As art historian Marco Livingston stated in the catalogue accompanying Dine’s 1991 traveling solo exhibition in Japan, the artist’s familiarity with each symbol explored across a range of media, from paintings to prints to sculpture, “gives him license to treat it with even greater freedom…so the emphasis moves away from the symbolic identity of that image to the process by which it is invented anew. In the end what we are left with is not just another version of this or that-a heart or tools-but with the material evidence of the creative act.” (Marco Livingstone, Exh. Cat., Jim Dine, Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1999, p. 18).
In his writings and interviews detaling his artistic aim, Dine downplays the symbolic connotations of his motifs and instead emphasizes how they merely serve as a vehicles for the act of painting itself, even going so far as to say the motifs are merely “something to hang paint on” (Jim Dine, quoted in Exh. Cat., Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959–1969, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999, p. 208). As the tableaux for his creative expression, the artist enlivens the surface with displays of gestural brushwork, energetically sketched lines and a spectrum of colors and in the process, invites us to see the commonplace with new vigor.
Jim Dine’s work has been the subject of over 300 solo exhibitions since his first single-owner presentation in 1960, including recent shows at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018) and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Tate Gallery, London, among numerous other institutions.