ROSLYN, NY.- Within the galleries and on the sculpture grounds at the Nassau County Museum of Art, this exhibition highlights Jim Dine’s recent sculptural works. Sculpture / Jim Dine / Pinocchio will be on view at the Museum from March 31 through July 8, 2012. The museum’s main galleries will be devoted to several themes – the artist’s Heart and Venus works, Gardening and Carpentry Tool imagery, and recent Pinocchio sculptures. Several major sculptural works will be installed outdoors on the Museum’s expansive 145-acre sculpture park and nature preserve, including The Mountains in the Distance of 1987-88. This iconic bronze work places the Venus de Milo form on its side, abstracting the vertical of the figure to evoke a horizontal of a landscape.

The second floor of the Museum will be devoted to Dine’s Pinocchio prints. The impressive Pinocchio series, also published as illustrations to a translation of Carlo Collodi’s original tale, consists of 40 lithographs. The accompanying book concludes with Dine dedicating his work to the adventurous wooden boy. “His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his vanity about his temporary donkey ears all add up to the real sum of his parts. In the end it is his great heart that holds me.”

A catalogue for the exhibition was produced by Steidl Publishers in 2010 for the exhibition Jim Dine: Sculpture at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As Joseph Antenucci Becherer, Vice President and Chief Curator, comments in the introduction to the catalogue, “There is little doubt that Jim Dine is among the most profound and prolific artists of our time. Since his prodigious emergence on the New York art scene in the late 1950’s, he has proved to be one of America’s most original and decidedly focused voices beckoning to audiences across the nation and around the globe.

Since the precocious opening of his career, Dine has also been a sculptor of great merit. He lives with the statuette he has found, distills the tool we have all held, ferments the consumer culture in inparian and plastic. Because he knows himself, is undaunted by time and remains in control of his own creative prowess, he can harvest the uncanny from the common, deliver nobility from among the plebian.

For instance, simply consider the artist’s more recent series of the Pinocchio. The puppet and the story have been with Dine since his youth. Mass-produced objects of commercially successful visualizations of the story abound — versions of which have inhabited Dine’s physical world for decades. Yet for such abundance, or more poignantly, familiarity, the naught puppet yearning for boyhood, for humanity, has eventually become Dine’s own. It would be logical…..to label the series as Dine’s interpretation, but it is really Dine’s vision lived, distilled, fermented…….