Jan Dibbets is one of the figureheads of conceptual art, alongside artists such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. His training at St. Martins School of Art in London with fellow pupils such as Barry Flanagan and Richard Long, and the changing zeitgeist, caused Dibbets to distance himself from traditional painting in the 1960s. His ‘Heap Paintings’ from that period – mounds of monochrome canvases on the floor or against the wall – can be interpreted symbolically in the context of this end point. Shortly afterwards, Dibbets focused on photographic experiments around light and time. Research into photography itself and the recording of viewing scenarios played a central role in this.
The series ‘Perspective Corrections’ (1967-69) heralded his international breakthrough. In this work, Dibbets explores the relationship between reality and its photographic depiction. For example, he shows how a trapezium drawn on a wall of his studio becomes a perfect square on a photo. In around 1971, Dibbets allowed his camera to circle around a fixed point in the flat Dutch landscape. The horizon is thus reshaped into a curved line that appears to suggest mountains and valleys. Other research focuses on the passage of time, which is recorded by the incidence of light at set times, in his studio space for example. Dibbets ordered some of these photo series into grids of eight columns and ten rows. This lends an abstract quality to the result.
By breaking open our way of looking, Dibbets questions our view of reality, which is still strongly determined by perspective. In more recent work too, he offers new viewing scenarios which call into question our conditioned understanding of reality.
