Jim Dine. Flo‑Master Hearts. 1969. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Thomas E. Benesch Memorial Collection. BMA 1970.21.5. ©Jim Dine.

BALTIMORE.- The series of contemporary art exhibitions in The Baltimore Museum of Art’s experimental project space continues with Front Room: Jim Dine. On view June 11 – October 5, 2008, the exhibition features approximately 20 works on paper and one sculpture from the BMA’s holdings along with loans from private collections.

Front Room: Jim Dine includes works that draw upon everyday images, as well as Dine’s own personal experiences. Highlights of the exhibition are the first prints the artist made, five lithographs revealing his anguish following a fatal car accident called Car Crash (1963); two remarkable etchings, Five Paintbrushes and Braid (both 1973), which explore the sensuality of human hair; and the book The Temple of Flora (1984), which weds botany and poetry. Recent additions to the collection featured in the exhibition include A Side View in Florida (1986), an enlarged hand-colored image of a skull from Gray’s Anatomy, and Raven on Lebanese Border (2000), a masterful combination of both etching and woodcut techniques. The Five Hammer Études (2007) was given by the artist on the occasion of this exhibition.

Since his first exhibition in 1958, American artist Jim Dine (b. 1935) has been a forceful presence on the American art scene. Known for creating familiar motifs that are both easily recognizable and mysterious, Dine’s art explores Jungian questions of humankind’s place in the world through a marriage of raw emotion and Pop aesthetics. Although closely linked with Pop art, what sets him apart from his peers is his depiction of intensely personal images such as shoes, neckties, and tools; the latter which he came to appreciate while working in his grandfather’s hardware store as a teenager. The physical evidence of Dine’s hand—including accidents and corrections—is as important as the subjects pictured in the works of art themselves and is proof of the artist’s existence in the world.

Jim Dine. A Side View in Florida. 1986. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Women's Committee Fund for Contemporary Prints and Photographs. BMA 2007.223. ©Jim Dine