Jim Dine

Museum Folkwang is holding a major exhibition on the graphic work of American artist Jim Dine (b. 1935). Dine was one of the most important Pop artists of the 1960s, and won early recognition for his art, not just in the US but internationally. The retrospective Jim Dine. About the Love of Printing coinciding with his eightieth birthday features some 250 works – including woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings – and presents a representative survey of the artist’s work in the graphic medium, spanning more than five decades.

More than any other artist of his generation, Dine has created works using a wide variety of printmaking techniques and has repeatedly tested the limits and possibilities of graphic art – right up to incising the printing plates with a chainsaw.

The themes in Dine’s prints are as varied as the techniques used to depict them. Most noteworthy of all however is his best-known motif: the heart symbol. Dine’s hearts have long become popular motifs, recognizable to audiences outside the traditional art world.

As a special highlight, the exhibition presents Jim Dine’s most recent works: large-scale polychrome woodblock prints made in spring 2015. For the first time in his long career as an artist, Dine here eschews representation of a concrete subject and instead gives vent to his irrepressible desire to play with colours and surfaces, forms and structures.