JAN DIBBETS
2013-02-25Jan 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.
Exhibition runs through till March 29th, 2013
Galerie Nelson-Freeman
59 rue Quincampoix
75004 Paris
France
