JAN DIBBETS

Trained as a painter, Jan Dibbets questioned himself on what he could do to unlearn what he learned in art school. He was at the time deeply impressed by Mondriaan and his ultimate abstraction of reality. His artistic practice and experiments started when he first held a camera and looked at this medium that could give him a similar analytical contemplation of space and perspective. With the results of his photographic processes Dibbets brought a radical overhaul of the perception of photography within conceptual art and art institutions in general.

Dibbets search for a balance between photography and geometrical formulas, thinking about perspective, positioning and the viewers’ perception results in images that achieve an abstraction based in reality. He questions the content of his photographs as hybrid conventions of society by presenting them as mathematical constructions and spatial distributions.

With the series ‘Colorstudies’ Jan Dibbets tested the limits of the clearly apparent abstraction of reality. This practice of abstracting until the state of containing nothing led to the idea of a smooth, illuminated surface. His ambition to demonstrate that reality is an abstraction culminates in these negatives (first shots taken in the 1970s) of closely-cropped shots showing details of car hoods. They create an image of almost painterly monochrome works, being printed on large format and show what is best demonstrated as void of all referencing and structure.

Jan Dibbets’s work is based on an intuitive search towards a different way of discerning visuality, perception and perspective.