“Tools are a stand in for the human hand. They’re who I am”: Inside Jim Dine’s Retrospective at Cristea Roberts Gallery

London's Cristea Roberts Gallery presents over five decades of work by Jim Dine

Jim Dine working on large-scale, unique prints at Steindruck Studio, Apetlon, Austria, 2024. Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London. Photo credit: Christoph Chavanne

BY JONATHAN OROZCO December 13, 2024

Ohio-born artist Jim Dine, associated with Pop Art (a label he rejects), is having a notable year of major exhibitions. Earlier this year, he presented 32 works at the Venice Biennale in a show titled ‘Dog on the Forge’, ranging from paintings to monumental bronze sculptures. Now, he is the subject of the thematic retrospective ‘Tools And Dreams’ at Cristea Roberts Gallery. Like Andy Warhol who rendered shoes via serial screenprints, Dine depicts tools with gestural strokes and splatters.

A Life Carved and Shaped by Tools

For Dine, the focus on tools is personal and complex. At the age of twelve, the artist’s mother died, and he was then raised by his maternal grandparents who owned a hardware store in Cincinnati.

“My grandfather had a shop in his basement–a wood-working shop,” Dine recalls. “I worked there since I was 9. It was chock-full of objects, of desire. I liked being there. It was a place to daydream. When I was 16, my grandpa was dying and I just took the keys and went to art school at night. And it certainly saved my life. In those years, and actually in my grandpa’s basement, is where I made my first print.”

Surrounded by chisels, brushes, knives, and burins, these objects not only became tools for Dine to create, they became emotionally charged childhood symbols. 

Installation view of Jim Dine: Tools and Dreams at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 2024. Courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery, London Photo: Sam Roberts Photography.

Within and Beyond Pop Art

Dine’s recent work is somewhere in between collage and assemblage, both of which were popular art-making methods among 20th century artists. Like Marcel Duchamp, Dine takes tools as readymade objects and formulates new compositions that go beyond the original intention of a tool.

Other artists relied on pre-existing imagery as a starting point. For Warhol, his subjects was impersonal and based in mass culture; or for an artist like Robert Raushenberg, images of politicians or thrifted materials became his medium.

The works in this exhibition engage in common Pop Art tropes, like repetition and a graphical application of loud hues. Dine even has images of Pinocchio, a recurring symbol in his work - but the focus is personal. It’s like he is writing a visual autobiography of his teenage years, and equally, a history of tools across time.

“Jim has consistently refused to be bound by any art historical label – especially Pop – and everything he makes in painting, sculpture, poetry and print continually pushes boundaries," said David Roberts, Dine’s gallerist.

One self-referential work titled “Asleep with his Tools, Jim Dreams (Screen),” fabricated in 2019, works within millenia of art history. This large scale piece is composed of five rectangular panels and appears like a historical folding screen. The imagery exists within a hazy cloud of bold colors, depicting an ancient sphinx looking to the right, broken ancient Greek sculptures, and an image of a near-Eastern soldier. And of course, tools scattered in a random pattern.

Throughout history, folding screens have been used functionally as room dividers and privacy screens, but also as surfaces to depict scenery. Mexico, as an example, had a rich tradition of using these screens, with a notable piece from the late 1600s at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More recently, Miami artist Jillian Mayer created a sculpture that reads as a folding screen for her 2019 exhibition TIMESHARE. Like Dine, Mayer uses strong colors to create an abstract expressionist-like composition. 

Jim Dine, Five Paintbrushes (third state), 1973, Etching / Paper and Image: 75.6 x 94.8 cm - 29 3/4 x 37 3/8 in, Edition of 28. Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Jim Dine

Creation and Destruction

“Tools are a stand in for the human hand,” Dine says. “They’re who I am. I am a chronicler of my history and of my own consciousness and of my past. I'm wedded to them. Everything I do is made with my hands,” Dine adds. “I’m here to work with my hands. I like the trace of my hand and I like the history that this has in it.”

The focus on tools does not detract from the hand-made quality of Dine’s art - rather, the industrial sharp and round edges of the tools are a stark contrast that would otherwise be almost purely abstract. And rather than seeing tools as purely generative, the works also remind viewers that tools can be used to remove and destroy - but not on their own.Tools are not neutral actors - they are shaped by their environments and controlled by humans to complete a task, whether it is to build or destroy. 

Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, discusses a similar interplay between the hand and technology. Often associated with 3D printing, van Herpen explained in a catalog interview with Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that her work is primarily done by hand.

“[B]etween 70 and 90 percent of my work is done by hand - hand cutting, hand stitching,” she said. “Even when I use machines, the hand is never absent - a machine needs human hands to operate it.”

Jim Dine, Color and Ink, 2023, Hand-coloured etching with charcoal and acrylic paint, Paper and Image: 138.3 x 105.1 cm - 54 1/2 x 41 3/8, Edition of 8. Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Jim Dine

A Collaborative Practice  

Dine’s printmaking is often a collaboration. In 1975, Dine travelled to Paris to work with Aldo Crommelynck, a famous intaglio printer who worked with artists like Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Dine created the series "New French Tools" in 1983-4 with Crommelynck, using power tools like a drill and rotary sander - which was in stark contrast to Crommelynck’s traditionally delicate approach.

"Jim would pick up a grinder, or pick up a paintbrush. It was the same thing,” said Daniel Clarke, a lithograph printer Dine has worked with. “He'd pick up a chainsaw, and it was a language, a mark-making language. I had never seen anyone work that way, and I don't think many people have." 

In his 2023 "Color and Ink" series, Dine worked with Kathy Kuehn and Julia d’Amario to make eight large hand-painted copper-plate etchings. After each printing, he added and removed visual elements and finished each with hand-painting.