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Jan Dibbets: Land Sea Colour

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This is the catalog from the 2013 show at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London. A pioneer of conceptualism in the 1960s, Jan Dibbets was one of the first artists to challenge traditional perceptions of the photographic image. From the outset, his work sought to deconstruct the notion that the camera was a mechanical tool whose primary function was to capture and record three-dimensional images solely to be printed onto a two-dimensional surface. To Dibbets, photography was, and still is, an artistic medium as versatile and complex as any other and one which can be used to create abstraction, figuration and directly challenge notions about how pictorial space is depicted and viewed. A major component of Dibbets early explorations used multiple photographic images of fragments of land and seascapes collaged together to create illusory 'horizons'; this subject has remained at the heart of much of his work to the present day. Dibbets' Colour Studies are in direct and stark contrast to the constructed forms and lines of the Horizons. Initiated in 1975, this work removes both the traditional 'subject' and formal structure from the photographic image. Whilst they feature details from the polished metalwork of car bodies, they have nothing to do per se with the vehicles - they are Dibbets' own abstractions, at once both purely photographic and painterly. These are not documentary studies nor are they chromatic reproductions of another object's colour, but rather they are an examination into the very surface and colour properties of the photographic image itself. Once printed, the cars and their colour become almost irrelevant - it is the photographs themselves which are the subject.

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