VIENNA.- The ALBERTINA Museum is presenting the highlights of its large collection of works by Jim Dine - a representative selection of the artist's generous donation that represents his oeuvre in a multifaceted way.

Jim Dine is often categorized as one of the pioneers of Pop Art: a misunderstanding. But anyone who, like Dine, arranged everyday objects into assemblages, no matter how much they were interwoven with his own biography, was almost inevitably assigned to Pop Art in the early 1960s. Jim Dine's early preference for “popular motifs” such as the heart, garishly colorful and loud, or the subject of the trivial bathrobe inevitably drew him into the maelstrom of this American awakening of the 1960s. Added to this was the artist's admiration for the fathers of Pop Art, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg: the label of Pop Art was thus to stick to Jim Dine's work for a long time, thus blocking access to its deeply subjective dimension.

Jim Dine describes himself as a drawing painter and is rightly convinced that he cannot be pigeonholed into any art genre or ism. His free and unconventional approach to the possibilities of painting, drawing and printmaking and his openness to experimentation, whether it leads to abstraction or remains connected to the representational, are an expression of his value-free encounter with the pictorial object.

The self-portrait as a revelation of the self

The large number of self-portraits is a special feature of Dine's work. Even the clarification that the artist understands the bathrobe as a self-thematization, as a self-portrait, has not prevented this group of works from being seen as merely the reproduction of the most external thing that can clothe a person.

The group of self-portraits allows for an independent, intensive and surprising dialog with the artist and his work. While Rembrandt, for example, portrays himself in his self-portraits as a drunken beggar, a nobleman, a prodigal son, a successful painter or a failed, doubting painter. Albrecht Dürer also knows the wide range between the Christological self-interpretation or the proud fiancé.

In contrast to these forefathers of the self-portrait, Jim Dine always shows the same “I”, the same face, with little emotional variation. He almost always has the same facial expression: his gaze is serious. Jim Dine does not disguise himself. He does not play roles. His self-portraits are not contributions to various stages of a long life. They are not an autobiography, a situational self-analysis, a profound study of the psyche, thoughts and feelings in a datable moment of life. Rather, Jim Dine's self portraits are studies of that unchanging core of character that remains the same through all the ups and downs, storms, crises and joys of life. “I paint who I am, I paint what I am.” In this quote from Jim Dine, the artist declares his understanding of self-portrayal as a medium for revealing the self as it was, is and remains.

The subjective in the objectivity of everyday life

In fact, Jim Dine was always concerned with the innermost, the most subjective. For Dine, the bathrobe is an object with which he expresses his feelings. In fact, Jim Dine's work can be described as a reflection on himself. Marco Livingstone has rightly called Dine's work “a prolonged meditation on the self”. Not only is the motif of the bathrobe a placeholder for the artist himself, but the tools that have been omnipresent in his oeuvre for decades - hammer, saw, pliers - are also based on childhood memories of these strange objects. Nevertheless, for anyone who varies a bathrobe in hundreds of shapes, formats, techniques and colors, the bathrobe eventually becomes what it is: a bathrobe, an ordinary object.

The use and further development of different printing processes testify to Dine's fascination with printmaking techniques.

The artist always emphasizes the great importance of collaboration with the respective printer, not only because it represents an antithesis to solitary work in the studio, but also because creative exchange and productive implementation take place in this cooperation.

Dine experiments with a wide range of techniques and materials and thematizes youth and age, intimacy and extraversion as well as seriality and creativity on paper. His figurative motifs can be read as representatives of the artist, as an objectification of his feelings, as Dine himself explains.

The exhibition can be seen at the ALBERTINA Museum from 8 November 2024 to 23 March 2025.