Jan Dibbets

From 22nd October 2004 to 13th February 2005

From 22nd October 2004 to 13th February 2005, the Musée Zadkine pays homage to Jan Dibbets, a Dutch artist associated with the conceptual movement of the late 1960s. Included in this exhibition is an unpublished triptych from 1978 and an exceptional collection of work produced during the summer of 2003 (Saenredam-Zadkine) based on areas of the house, garden and studio of Ossip Zadkine.

The last retrospective of Jan Dibbets’ work took place in 1991 in France, at the Centre national de la photographie/Palais de Tokyo. In 1994, Jan Dibbets created the publicly commissioned Hommage à Arago in Paris. In 2000, he inaugurated the thirty-two stained-glass windows in the Cathedral of Blois, another large-scale work.

At the Musée Zadkine, the Saenredam-Zadkine series is an invitation, as are the different homages by Dibbets to the 17th-century Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam, to question ourselves on the transformative properties of the photographic act. Jan Dibbets shows that the photographic image carries the idea of "transformation" just as much as that of "information", thus opening it up to representational processes in the most pictorial sense of the term. By choosing to present his work at the Musée Zadkine, Dibbets demonstrates the importance which he places on the fact that works, once completed, should be presented in their place of origin. In addition, he asserts his association with the history of conceptual art, a phenomenon which highlights the reinterpretation of public spaces.