Jan Dibbets: Essays by R H Fuchs

Photographs by the Dutch artist are accompanied by discussions of his career and the role of abstraction in his work

Austere and mysterious, Jan Dibbets's conceptual photographs of architectural motifs explore the nature of perception with poetic logic. By isolating a high, luminous window against a subdued color field, pictures direct the viewer's gaze to soar through the open window into a figurative space beyond. The effect is pardoxically unsettling and serene at once. In the window pictures, in Dutch ceilings and Italian pavements amplified by geometric annotations, the Dutch-born photographer subtly underscores the sensory basis of all intellectualization and the permanence of content in any process of abstraction. Aided by 146 plates (111 in color), Fuchs, who has covered Dibbets for Artnews and Art/World, relates the photo-constructions to Vermeer's interiors and Mondrian's expansive spatial structures. In her sensitive essay Moure, a curator, explains how Dibbets's pictures deconstruct visual space with multiplying viewpoints, graded shades of light and fragmented exposure times.
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