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Lot Essay
In El Born Barcelona, Jan Dibbets deftly examines the interplay of light, space, perspective and form. Capturing the skylight and the beamed cupola of the market in El Born, Barcelona, the diptych takes its place within the celebrated series of window compositions that lie at the heart of the artist’s practice. Combining sharp technical rigour with entrancing optical effect, these works extend his pioneering investigations into the illusory powers of photography. Beginning in the late 1960s with his seminal series of Perspective Corrections, Dibbets championed the medium as a ‘thinking’ tool: one that, like painting, could reinterpret its subjects as much as represent them. In the present work, windows – traditionally conceived as gateways to the outside world – become abstract, dematerialised structures, floating like luminous beacons within vacant diagrammatic voids. As Erik Verhagen has written, ‘they finalize a slow process of evolution which … saw the photographic material cut back to its most rudimentary, most essential level of expression’ (E. Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work, Leuven 2014, p. 146).
Born in Holland, Dibbets is frequently seen as a contemporary heir to the Dutch Renaissance masters who first captured the perspectival impact of changing light conditions. Inspired by the work of Anthony Caro and Richard Long whilst studying at Central St Martin’s in London, he was among the earliest artists to exploit photography for its distortive potential, rather than for its documentary capabilities. ‘Every photograph is a lie’, he has explained. ‘It doesn’t represent anything. Therefore it is both real and abstract. Photography is very easy and very complicated at the same time … You need a key and if you are lucky enough to find one it’s like opening Pandora’s Box; tricky and fascinating and dangerous. It’s a wonderful world, photography. It’s the new painting’ (J. Dibbets, quoted in conversation with S. Boothroyd, 19 April 2013, https://thisistomorrow.info/articles/an-interview-with-jan-dibbets [accessed 31 July 2017]). His fascination with windows is, in this regard, laced with metaphorical overtones. In Dibbets’ oeuvre, photography no longer looks out onto a single reality, as if through a clear pane of glass, but instead sheds light upon its shifting, reflexive nature.
Born in Holland, Dibbets is frequently seen as a contemporary heir to the Dutch Renaissance masters who first captured the perspectival impact of changing light conditions. Inspired by the work of Anthony Caro and Richard Long whilst studying at Central St Martin’s in London, he was among the earliest artists to exploit photography for its distortive potential, rather than for its documentary capabilities. ‘Every photograph is a lie’, he has explained. ‘It doesn’t represent anything. Therefore it is both real and abstract. Photography is very easy and very complicated at the same time … You need a key and if you are lucky enough to find one it’s like opening Pandora’s Box; tricky and fascinating and dangerous. It’s a wonderful world, photography. It’s the new painting’ (J. Dibbets, quoted in conversation with S. Boothroyd, 19 April 2013, https://thisistomorrow.info/articles/an-interview-with-jan-dibbets [accessed 31 July 2017]). His fascination with windows is, in this regard, laced with metaphorical overtones. In Dibbets’ oeuvre, photography no longer looks out onto a single reality, as if through a clear pane of glass, but instead sheds light upon its shifting, reflexive nature.