Jan Dibbets
02 Feb - 29 Mar 2013
JAN DIBBETS
New Colorstudies 1976/2012
2 February – 29 March 2013
Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present new work by Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Jan Dibbets has been a major figure in the international art world for more than forty years. Initially trained as a painter at the fine arts academy in Tilburg, Jan Dibbets turned to photography at the end of the 1960s, and such early series as "Perspective Corrections" became one of the essential foundations of Conceptual Art. To this day his work revolves around questions that pertain to the structure of photography and the mechanisms of perception, "what we see" as opposed to "what we know."
For this first exhibition at the gallery, Jan Dibbets will show for the first time a new series of large-scale photographs, New Colorstudies 1976/2012. Using negatives shot in the 1970s that were quite direct explorations of depicting color without an obvious structure, these new works use a large scale unavailable at that time to create almost painterly monochrome works. All are close-cropped details of car hoods – “flat and shiny like a photograph” – on which might be reflected sky and trees, photographs that are simultaneously as abstract as they are precise representation. The found industrial color of the cars, reproduced with the equally industrial chemical color of film chemistry, in the 70s Dibbets left unaltered; but in this new series he has often manipulated the color, bringing us back to the questions of representation and reality that are at the core of Dibbets’s work.
New Colorstudies 1976/2012 illustrates afresh Dibbets’s ambition to “demonstrate that reality is an abstraction,” and to bring both abstraction and figuration together through the photographic medium.
Jan Dibbets was born in Weert, Holland, in 1941, and now lives and works in Amsterdam. Since 1967, Dibbets has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1972) and Documenta in Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982). His work is part of many public collections including the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) and the Musée national d'Art Moderne (Paris). One-person exhibitions have been organized at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1972, 1996), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) together with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1987), and most recently at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010).
New Colorstudies 1976/2012
2 February – 29 March 2013
Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present new work by Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Jan Dibbets has been a major figure in the international art world for more than forty years. Initially trained as a painter at the fine arts academy in Tilburg, Jan Dibbets turned to photography at the end of the 1960s, and such early series as "Perspective Corrections" became one of the essential foundations of Conceptual Art. To this day his work revolves around questions that pertain to the structure of photography and the mechanisms of perception, "what we see" as opposed to "what we know."
For this first exhibition at the gallery, Jan Dibbets will show for the first time a new series of large-scale photographs, New Colorstudies 1976/2012. Using negatives shot in the 1970s that were quite direct explorations of depicting color without an obvious structure, these new works use a large scale unavailable at that time to create almost painterly monochrome works. All are close-cropped details of car hoods – “flat and shiny like a photograph” – on which might be reflected sky and trees, photographs that are simultaneously as abstract as they are precise representation. The found industrial color of the cars, reproduced with the equally industrial chemical color of film chemistry, in the 70s Dibbets left unaltered; but in this new series he has often manipulated the color, bringing us back to the questions of representation and reality that are at the core of Dibbets’s work.
New Colorstudies 1976/2012 illustrates afresh Dibbets’s ambition to “demonstrate that reality is an abstraction,” and to bring both abstraction and figuration together through the photographic medium.
Jan Dibbets was born in Weert, Holland, in 1941, and now lives and works in Amsterdam. Since 1967, Dibbets has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1972) and Documenta in Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982). His work is part of many public collections including the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.) and the Musée national d'Art Moderne (Paris). One-person exhibitions have been organized at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1972, 1996), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) together with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1987), and most recently at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010).