Jan Dibbets

The Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, born in Weert in 1941, numbers among the main representatives of European Conceptual art. His artistic strategies center around the problem of perception, of delusion, and illusion, and he relies on photography as his investigative means. Dibbets is especially interested in issues of perspective and its correction. In the late 1960s, the artist realized several temporary interventions in the form of land art projects outlining the problem of perception in a very poetic manner. Skillfully outwitting the camera eye, he turned the trapezoid form he had left on a stretch of sandy North Sea beach into a square in the photograph documenting it.




In recent years, Dibbets has focused on painted and built architectures famous for their perspectival effects. Photographed in perspective, both rose windows of old cathedrals and light openings of secular buildings constitute the elliptical or rhomboidal elements in the center of his pictures. The windows turn into frames through which the camera eye looks out from within, discovering the infinity of the sky and, increasingly, nature and the landscape.
Internationally acclaimed for more than three decades, Jan Dibbets has presented his work in solo exhibitions in numerous major museums, such as the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1971), the Oxford Museum of Modern Art (1977), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1980), the Guggenheim Museum New York (1987), and the Witte de With, Rotterdam (1996). Dibbets participated in the "documenta V” (1972), the "documenta VI” (1977), and the "documenta VII” (1982), as well as in the Biennials of Tokyo (1970), Sydney (1979), Venice (1972, 1988), and São Paolo (1983).
Jan Dibbets, who has held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, lives in Amsterdam and San Casciano Bagni.