Jan Dibbets "New Horizons"
Gladstone Gallery (Chelsea 24th Street)
This event has ended.
Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Jan Dibbets trained to be a painter, but turned to the photographic medium in the late 1960s. Harnessing the potential of photography to elucidate the conceptual variables of optics, his witty yet rigorous investigations of the elastic synthesis between object and space resulted in acute queries of vision and reality. Dibbets’ practice often resulted in richly paradoxical photographs such as his “Perspective Correction” series in which trapezoids drawn on his studio wall became perfect squares through the camera’s transformation of three-dimensional space into two-dimensional images. Challenging the myth that the photograph never lies, Dibbets fills the assumed paltriness of the reproduced image with a sense of intellectual wonder assumed to be absent from the unequivocality of both the photographic eye and reality.
For this new body of work entitled “New Horizons,” Dibbets returns to the optical structure that has become his hallmark. As Erik Verhagen says in his recent study of Dibbets’ oeuvre, “The horizon is not a subject like other subjects, for it exists only through and in relation to our sense of sight.” It is objective and subjective, circular and rectilinear, static and mobile. In these photographs, which conjoin different photographs of a landscape and seascape along the line of the horizon, Dibbets channels it as structuring principle, not only determining space and point of view, but also—in a very painterly way—the composition itself. By subordinating the mobility of the camera to the standardization of a straight line, these panoramas create a subtle tension between the seamlessness of the horizon line and the disjunction of land and sea, only further accentuated by the resulting asymmetrical compositions. The new works in this exhibition continue Dibbets’ sentiment when he said “In the whole world what is more beautiful than a straight line? And the horizon is a straight line in three dimensions: it’s an almost incredible phenomenon.”
Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam.
[Image: Jan Dibbets "Land-Sea G/83" (2007) Two unique color photographs mounted on mat board with graphite; 30 1/8 x 45 1/4 in]
Media
Schedule
from February 05, 2010 to March 13, 2010