Jan Dibbets – 50 Years of Colorstudies
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50 Years of Colorstudies is the first exhibition of Jan Dibbets at Loom Gallery, and is comprised of recent works from the series Colorstudies (produced from 2010 until 2022). Dibbets based the series on a photograph taken during 1976. This original is present at the gallery, in combination with the new pieces.
During the 70s Dibbets printed the images as large as the technology of the day would allow, and fifty years later, today’s digital techniques enable the production of even greater enlargements, leading to this new series of monumental ‘abstract’ photographs.
Developing a painterly approach to photography, Dibbets has challenged the assumption that photography produces only objective reproductions of reality, underlining the contradiction between what we know and what we perceive, between the supposedly conflicting realities of “abstraction” and “figuration”.
Exploring the possibilities for the photograph as an art object, Jan Dibbets has insisted on a single analogue negative as the Colorstudies source; in order to understand what possibilities digital reinterpretation can offer.
Jan Dibbets (1941, Weert, The Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam.
An early adopter of color film, Jan Dibbets maintains a philosophical practice that sits at the intersection of Conceptualism, Minimalism, land art, and photography. He has employed diverse photographic techniques—such as collage, fragmented exposure times, multiple viewpoints, and color modulation—to create unnatural horizons that subvert 17th-century Dutch landscape painting traditions, and has often taken inspiration from architectural elements such as floors, ceilings, and windows.
Dibbets won international acclaim after he presented at the Dutch pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale. He has since enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions around the world, and his work belongs in the collections of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Centre Pompidou, Tate, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Castello di Rivoli, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Guggenheim Museum etc. Alongside Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dibbets taught at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1984 to 2004 and has influenced entire generations of artists.Overall, Jan Dibbets has had a long and illustrious career as an artist, with a body of work that has contributed significantly to the development of conceptual art and photography.
