About the artist
1959: Born in Sittard, Netherlands
1984: His first individual exhibition took place in the Gallery of Moor in Amsterdam
Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has
produced a complex body of photographic
and video work, offering a contemporary
take on the genre of portraiture. Her
large-scale color photographs of young,
typically adolescent subjects recall 17th-century
Dutch painting in their scale and
visual acuity. The minimal contextual details
present in her photographs and videos
encourage us to focus on the exchange between
photographer and subject and the
relationship between viewer and viewed. Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective brings together
more than 70 photographs and five
videos in a major mid-career survey, offering
the most comprehensive presentation
of the artist’s work to date.
Dijkstra works in series, creating groups
of photographs and videos around a specific
typology or theme. In 1992, she started
making portraits of adolescents posed
on beaches from Hilton Head, South
Carolina, to Poland and Ukraine. Shot
from a low perspective, the subjects of the Beach Portraits (1992–2002), poised on the
brink of adulthood, take on a monumental presence. In contemporaneous works,
including portraits of new mothers after
giving birth, and photographs of bullfighters
immediately after leaving the ring,
Dijkstra sought subjects whose physical
exhaustion diminished the likelihood of an
artificed pose.
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