It is today, using the means offered by modern technology, when the artist considers that these photographs, conceived almost 40 years ago, can be shown with the intention with which they were taken at the time. These technological contributions, coupled, above all, with the fact that Dibbets is the first of the contemporary artists to recognize large color photography as a legitimate means of artistic expression, give this colorstudies series a capital importance in the artist’s career.
"Color studies" also explore one of the constants in Dibbets' work; the questioning between what we perceive and reality itself, between the reality of our surroundings and how we perceive this reality. The shots taken on the hoods and sides of cars in the middle and very close to the plane distort, due to its inherent shape and the predominance of a color, the reality that is reflected in the vehicle which, in addition to the deformation caused by its rounded shapes, it suffers the imperfections of the passage of time (stains or scratches) or the effect of that same reality of its environment (such as drops of water).
In the sixties Dibbets went from painting to photography. Since then, he has challenged the assumption that photography produces only reproductions of reality, opening the possibilities of photography and its creator: the photograph considered as an artistic object, and its creator, an artist, not just a photographer. Perhaps it is the Perspective Corrections series, which explores the dichotomy behind between the illusion that the camera creates and the reality that the eye sees, one of his first contributions to what is now recognized as conceptual art of what is considered, by many, the father in the field of photography.
Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam. He has held exhibitions individual at major institutions, including: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Miami Art Museum, Miami; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit; Espai Poblenau Foundation, Barcelona; Juan March Foundation, Madrid; Art Museum Wilmington; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany.
Jan Dibbets represented the Netherlands at the 1972 Venice Biennale.
Credits:
Courtesy Galería Cayón Madrid/Manila/Menorca.