Jan Dibbets

Background

Jan Dibbets was born in Weert, Holland, on March 9, 1941.

Education

He trained as an art teacher at the Tilburg Academy, before studying painting in Eindhoven between 1960-63. Dibbets travelled to London in 1967 and enrolled at Saint Martin's School of Art with a British Council scholarship. Here he was taught by the late Antony Caro, meeting and working alongside students, George Passmore - of Gilbert & George , Barry Flanagan and Richard Long.

Career

In 1967 Dibbets was one of the first artists to use colour photography as a genuine means of artistic expression. He embarked on a dialogue with the language of the emerging Land Art movement, using a camera to document his work. A major component of Dibbets's early explorations was the use of multiple photographic images of landscapes and seascapes collaged together to create illusory 'horizons'. Since then he has incorporated cupolas, windows and colour studies into his highly individual body of work.

His international reputation was established at the Dutch Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, and at Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, 1988.

His first American retrospective took place in 1987 beginning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, before travelling to several museums in the United States.

Dibbets has influenced generations of younger photographers both through his own work and his teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one of the foremost art schools in the world, where his tenure as professor, from 1984 to 2004, coincided with those of Josef Beuys, Gerard Richter, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. More recently Dibbets curated Pandora's Box: Jan Dibbets on Another Photography, at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, in Spring 2016. The exhibition, the first to be curated by Dibbets, offered an innovative and thought-provoking reinterpretation of the entire history of photography, both documentary and artistic.

Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Achievements

• Jan is a prominent painter and photographer famous for his unique style. Important ground-breaking bodies of work by the artist are housed in major public collections around the world including Museu Serralves, Porto; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
  
  Alan Cristea Gallery is the exclusive UK representative for Jan Dibbets's paintings, photographs and original prints.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Water Structure

  • Colorstudy

  • Panorama Dutch Mountain 12 x 15° Sea II A

  • Structure Panorama Study

  • Land-Sea FB3

  • Tollebeek II

  • Sea-Land HB1

  • Perspective Correction - My Studio II, 3: Square with Cross on Floor

  • Collage

  • Perspective Correction

Views

Quotations: "I start by thinking I'm going to make use of all possibilities without troubling any longer about problems when something starts to be art. I don't make the ETERNAL work of ART, I only give visual information."

"I really believe in having projects which in fact can't be carried out, or which are so simple that anyone could work them out. I once made four spots on the map of Holland, without knowing where they were. Then I found out how to get there and went to the place and took a snapshot. Quite stupid. Anybody can do that."

"The documentation about the work isn't of real importance to me either. I've done lots of works without taking photographs."

Connections

colleague:

Richard Long

References

• Jan Dibbets: Robin Redbreast's Territory Sculpture 1969
• Jan Dibbets: Another Photography
• Jan Dibbets: the photographic work (Lieven Gevaert Series (18))