Horizon I – Sea, 1971 by Jan Dibbets
2 channel video projection, colour, no sound 4’:39”/ 4’:39”
Images courtesy Stedelijk Museum
JAN DIBBETS (The Netherlands) b. 1941 was one of the early pioneers to use the camera as a contemporary art tool. He has worked across photography, film and video, but is best known for his photographic works that transform natural landscapes into geometric abstractions through shifts of angle and perspective. These seminal works are exemplary of Dibbet’s early moving image experiments, and demonstrate three approaches to framing the sea to produce different spatial effects. This is a rare opportunity to see the complete series presented in one space to create a dynamic shifting portrayal of the horizon abstracted by the camera’s point of view. Each work in the Horizon series tips and alters the camera’s frame so that the horizon line dissects the screen and in doing so both disrupts the illusion of realism of the video and flattens the pictorial space denying the illusion of depth.
Dibbets’ practice began as a painter and pioneered the use of photography as a conceptual art form and also film. He has shown numerous important exhibitions over the decades since the 70’s including in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate Liverpool, UK; Witte de With, Rotterdam Kölnische Kunstverein, Cologne; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; The Museum of Modern Art, New York Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Bern; XXXVI Biennale, Venice ;Kunstmuseum Basel Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago