HIGHLIGHT

Jim Dine is one of the leading contemporary artists of the United States. Although he is often grouped with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as a central figure of Pop Art, his practice spans from painting to sculpture and is characterized by forceful brushwork and a richly textured impasto. In parallel, he has pursued poetry, and this literary dimension deepens the resonance of his work.

His solo exhibitions have been mounted more than 300 times at major museums and galleries around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou. Most recently, an exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna—on view until March of this year—garnered significant acclaim.

In 1964, upon seeing a newspaper advertisement for a bathrobe, he felt that “although no one was inside it, it looked like me,” and since then he has repeatedly depicted the bathrobe as a self-portrait surrogate.

The present work is a large diptych that confronts this signature motif head-on. Over a gray ground, layered applications of thick paint and drips accumulate, producing a powerful presence precisely through the absence of a body.

While Jim Dine has kept his distance from being labeled a “Pop artist” who treats the realities of mass-consumption society with a certain lightness, standing before this introspective work—conceived as a self-portrait—makes his intention palpable.