Artist: Jim Dine

The gallery will be closed 22 December 2024 - 1 January 2025

This winter Cristea Roberts Gallery hosts a solo exhibition entitled Jim Dine: Tools and Dreams, by the American artist Jim Dine. Now aged 89 years old, the exhibition seeks to illustrate Dine’s lifelong relationship with hand-tools, featuring over forty works on paper, some monumental in scale, from the 1970s to the present. Throughout his printmaking career, tools have been a constant for the artist, not only as utilitarian implements used to mark his plates and blocks, but also as ‘objects of desire.’

The exhibition opens with Dine’s Five Paintbrushes, made between 1971 – 1975. For this series, the artist reworked one printing plate through seven different stages, depicting several brushes arranged in a row as if hanging on the wall of a workshop.

Gallery co-director David Cleaton-Roberts describes: “Far from being simply illustrative, they show Dine developing his vocabulary, seizing upon whatever came to hand and often combining them with the other symbols for which he was to become synonymous.” In the same way that robes and hearts reappear in Dine’s oeuvre as representative of the artist’s identity, hand tools also act as an autobiographical motif.

This autobiographical element stems from Dine’s childhood growing up in his grandfather’s hardware store in Cincinnati, where he played with pieces of pipe, hammers and screwdrivers. These formative experiences led Dine to revere tools, not merely as tools of the trade, but as symbols of creation and devotion.

The artist comments: “These tools...were developed not by an industrial designer. They were developed by somebody who used them. They were developed by guys who work with their hands.” Dine’s working class background and early childhood are pivotal to the work he makes and as a result, pliers, wrenches, bolt-cutters, etcetera, appear continuously from 1970 to the present.

The exhibition includes his most recent hand-coloured etchings entitled Color and Ink, 2023 and monumental new depictions of hammers, exhibited for the first time, taking their titles from the names of friends and family such as Dan, Nina, Jerri, 2024.

Alongside traditional printmaking tools, Dine uses power-tools in his printmaking process to grind, scrape and carve his woodblocks and etchings. His use of tools, normally reserved for construction purposes, not only accelerate his process but also create distinctive marks which he combines with other printing techniques.
His lithograph, Tools, The Rainbow, 1970 incorporates collage, hand-colouring and stamping to reflect his intense mode of working.

Also on display will be the artist’s hybrid work, Asleep with his Tools, Jim Dreams, 2018, a five-panel hand-painted woodcut mounted onto a folding screen and measuring over 3.5 x 2 metres. Dine’s approach is often unconventional and he deliberately subverts what a print should be, challenging traditional boundaries between unique and editioned works.

In the 1970s the artist worked with the French master printer Aldo Crommelynck, producing over one hundred works and developing a close friendship. The meticulous printer, who worked with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse, was initially startled by Dine’s use of power tools over traditional devices – such as the artist’s use of dental drills rather than steel-tipped etching tools. However, their collaboration resulted in a great many intaglio prints including the compositional masterpiece, Tools and Dreams, 1985, which combined several of Dine’s tool images and led to the title of this exhibition.

In a similar approach to Picasso, Dine rarely destroys a printing plate and may re-use imagery in future compositions. Twenty years after the original Tools and Dreams print, the same plates were incorporated into The Five Hammer Etudes, an etching that encapsulates the artist’s lyricism.

Dine has long sought to illustrate the connection between life, work and making art, with hand-tools acting as the ultimate symbol of creation. The artist comments: “At three years old, I remember sitting on the steps outside my grandfather’s garage and taking pieces of pipe, and rolling them down the stairs, just letting them go, like a Slinky toy, but it was pipe.

I would just play with these objects of desire, like a hammer, or I’d grab a screwdriver and pretend to be an adult. I thought they were so beautiful. It was a non-verbal meeting.”

The artist’s solo show at Cristea Roberts Gallery takes place just as the simultaneous exhibition of Dine’s at the Albertina Museum in Vienna combines both prints and drawings and celebrates a generous donation from the artist to the museum’s collection.

Tools and Dreams, Dine’s thirteenth solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an introductory text by gallery co-director David Cleaton-Roberts.