Fotogramas de producción de Jan Dibbets '12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective', producido por Gerry Schum para la serie 'Land Art' en 1969. © Cortesía de Jan Dibbets.
Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam. He has had solo exhibitions at major institutions, including: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Miami Art Museum in Miami or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1987, which subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, throughout 1988 and 1989.
Dibbets has influenced generations of young photographers both through his own work and through his teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one of the world’s leading art schools, where he taught from 1984 to 2004, alongside Josef Beuys, Gerard Richter and Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Important bodies of pioneering works by the artist are in major public collections around the world, including the Museu Serralves in Porto, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Thus, the exhibition will showcase three of his most important series. Until 1976 he explored the perception and empirical character of color through his series known as "colorstudies". At that time, Dibbets printed the images as large as the technology of the time allowed. Forty years later, today's digital techniques allow the production of extreme enlargements, which led to the new series of monumental 'abstract' color studies, the New Color Studies (2010-2014).
B.O.U., Untitled, diptych III, 2019 Fotografía digital sobre dibond, 250 x 250 cm. 2/2. JD025
Diptych S7, 2012. Fotografía digital sobre dibond, 250 x 250 cm. 2/2. JD028
Thus, Dibbets based this series on automobile bodywork negatives photographed in 1976, creating large abstract color surfaces by decontextualizing (by its representation in very close-up) a detail of the initial image – which was that of the hood of a Saab – from which one can guess the different curvatures of the sheet metal, the reflections and other accidents that, seen in close-up, accentuate the character – more than abstract, conceptual – of the photograph.
In this way, the New Color Studies are presented in combination with the original Colorstudies created in the seventies. They are, undoubtedly, his most autonomous works, showing a clearly post-photographic reality in which the computer system allows an extraordinary enlargement of the negative, surprisingly revealing pixelated and mysterious plots whose origin is unknown even to the computer scientists themselves.
These technological contributions, together with the fact that Dibbets was the first contemporary artist to recognize large color photography as a legitimate means of artistic expression, give this colorstudies series a major importance in the artist’s career and in the photography of the last 50 years.
The colorstudies also explore one of the constants in Dibbets' work; the questioning between what we perceive and reality itself, between the reality around us and how we perceive this reality.
Installation view, Jan Dibbets, Cayón, 2023.
Installation view, Jan Dibbets, Cayón, 2023.
Finally, as a third series, and presented for the first time, the gallery will exhibit Color variations on A.D., Hommage a A.D., composed of five works apparently monochrome but full of details and shades in color, as chromatic variations, which, again, show the subtlety in the analysis of photography in Dibbets' work.
Installation view, Jan Dibbets, Cayón, 2023.
Thus, in this last image of the installation in the space of Blanca de Navarra 9, we can appreciate these three series we are talking about; in the first place -starting from the left- we have the original "Colorstudies", in the center the monumental "New Color Studies" and finally, on the right, the "Color variations on A.D., Hommage a A.D", which make a boast to the monochromatic elegance.
