Pop art icon Jim Dine's work at Buckhead gallery

Bottom line: Pop artist Jim Dine’s colorful, authoritative works are monumental in size and reputation, even if the overall effect of these assembled pieces is less than overwhelming.

Andy Warhol had his soup cans and Jasper Johns his flags and targets.

For one of the last Pop artists standing, Jim Dine, his visual vocabulary is similarly iconic. Dine’s prints, paintings and sculptures are populated with his instantly recognizable Disney Pinocchios, hand tools, the Venus de Milo, hearts and bathrobes. Those visual touchstones are represented in a solo show of Dine’s work “80” at Buckhead’s Alan Avery Art Company. The title is a reference to this seminal Pop artist’s age, and a lifetime defined by incredible output as well as a fascinating movement between experimentation and a constant return to familiar motifs.

Over the course of his long career Dine has written poetry, engaged in the performance art “Happenings” that epitomized the counter cultural 60s spirit and made many forays into set design, sculpture, assemblage, painting and printmaking. All of us should be so lucky to have pushed ourselves to innovate while defining a personal sensibility as completely as Dine has. Along with Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, Dine was a pop artist whose lexicon was often drawn from popular culture, though Dine infused his objects with the subjective, personal imprint of the artist, creating far more emotional and expressionist works. His image of a bathrobe, for instance, though sourced from a newspaper advertisement, has functioned as Dine’s self-portrait since the early 60s. His images of tools suggest the tool as a stand-in for the hand and the process of creation, but also reference the hardware store owned by his father in his hometown of Cincinnati.

“80” is evidence of both Dine’s cultural sway—full of lusty color and authority—but also of how some art can feel more like the coalescing of a celebrated artistic aura, familiar icons and big money. If Dine’s impact has faded over time, it’s understandable. Like Warhol’s soup cans, there comes a time when even an art world image endlessly reproduced, loses some of its resonance.

This Dine solo show features 15 works, including singular prints and print editions with and without hand painting. What almost all of the works have in common is simple objects given expressionist inflection with amped up color and line.

Intense color to convey emotion is a constant in the show, and a device that gives “80” its impact. Vivid hues range from blazing fluorescents to chalky mattes, from school bus yellows to Dine’s beloved shade: a Valentine’s-worthy red that blazes from the surface of his diptych “VW, 9” combining intaglio, woodcut and hand painting. “VW, 9” features side by side bathrobes, that here become a fugue on how color changes everything. The bathrobe on the left: as peppy and optimistic as a Nancy Reagan power suit. The bathrobe on the right: moody, even menacing when striated with a sooty black. Dine’s mark-making ranges from streaky swaths of paint to intense islands of color mashed up against other hues in a war of influence.

Dine has often been celebrated for his wry wit, an almost cartoonish sensibility most evident in his juiced-up digital print with copperplate etching “Venus D,B,C 10.” In that work a headless Venus de Milo is rendered in Smurf blue surrounded by a solar system of pulsating islands of color: marigold, peony pink, blush and green, swirling around the Venus like some acknowledgement of the electric potential of art.