Jan Dibbets

Jan Dibbets was born in Weert, Holland, in 1941. He trained as an art teacher at the Tilburg Academy, before studying painting in Eindhoven between 1960-63. Dibbets travelled to London in 1967 and enrolled at Saint Martin's School of Art with a British Council scholarship. Here he was taught by the late Antony Caro, meeting and working alongside students, George Passmore - of Gilbert & George -, Barry Flanagan and Richard Long.

In 1967 Dibbets was one of the first artists to use colour photography as a genuine means of artistic expression.  He embarked on a dialogue with the language of the emerging Land Art movement, using a camera to document his work.  A major component of Dibbets's early explorations was the use of multiple photographic images of landscapes and seascapes collaged together to create illusory 'horizons'. Since then he has incorporated cupolas, windows and colour studies into his highly individual body of work.

His international reputation was established at the Dutch Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, and at Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, 1988. His first American retrospective took place in 1987 beginning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, before travelling to several museums in the US.

Dibbets has influenced generations of younger photographers both through his own work and his teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one of the foremost art schools in the world, where his tenure as professor, from 1984 to 2004, coincided with those of Josef Beuys, Gerard Richter, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. More recently Dibbets curated Pandora's Box: Jan Dibbets on Another Photography, at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, in Spring 2016. The exhibition, the first to be curated by Dibbets, offered an innovative and thought-provoking reinterpretation of the entire history of photography, both documentary and artistic.

Important ground-breaking bodies of work by the artist are housed in major public collections around the world including Museu Serralves, Porto; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

Cristea Roberts Gallery is the UK representative for Jan Dibbets's paintings, photographs and the exclusive publisher of his original prints.

Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.