Rineke Dijkstra — I See You
The MEP is proud to announce a major exhibition of the photographic and video works of the internationally renowned Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. Taking over one complete floor, Dijkstra will install four of her most important video installations, all presented for the first time in a Parisian institution.
-
Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009, 6'33'' © Rineke Dijkstra - Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris et New York -
Anna, The Gymschool, 2014, 15'16'' © Rineke Dijkstra - Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris et New York -
Eva, The Gymschool, 2014, 15'16'' © Rineke Dijkstra - Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris et New York -
Marianna (The Fairy Doll), 2014, 19'13'' © Rineke Dijkstra - Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris and New York
The exhibition
Dijkstra is celebrated both for her photographic and video works, many of which deal with questions of identity, the passage of time and intimacy. Already present in the collection of the MEP, among many major global collections with substantial photographic series often following the development of her portrait subjects over extended periods of time, Dijkstra’s work in portraiture has turned increasingly to video in recent years.
With a career spanning more than three decades, Rineke Dijkstra has established her reputation with incredible sensitivity to the ethical and creative contract put in place when an artist sets out to capture the appearance and personality of a human subject with the camera lens, whether as still or moving images. Her work poses essential questions about the ways in which people present themselves to be seen, and the ways in which this auto-representation changes over time, through age and experience, and through learned codes of socialisation.
The video works selected for the MEP exhibition deal exclusively with the ways in which younger people look, and present themselves to be seen as portrait subjects in the process of establishing their identities, whether as school students, performers and/or consumers of visual culture. In many ways, through holding up the camera to face her subjects, Dijkstra challenges us all to re-think the ways in which we look and attach meaning to images of others and thereby how we understand our own roles in contemporary society.
Curators : Simon Baker and Clothilde Morette
Videostill from Anna, The Gymschool, 2014, 15’16” © Rineke Dijkstra – Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris et New York
The artist
Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands, in 1959. Since the early 1990s, she has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the portrait genre by drawing on the history of portraiture – both painted and photographic – Rineke Dijkstra creates representations of often adolescent subjects that appear simultaneously vulnerable and enigmatic. 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.
Her work has been exhibited around the world, including a comprehensive retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2012 and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2017. She has been honored with the Johannes Vermeer Award (2020); Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017); the Macallan Royal Photographic Society Award, London (2012); the Citibank Photography Prize (1999) and the Kodak Award Netherlands (1987), among others. In 2013, the first comprehensive film retrospective of her work,
The Krazy House, was shown at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt.
Rineke Dijkstra studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986. She has been awarded several prizes, including the Johannes Vermeer Prize (2020), the Hasselblad Foundation International Prize (2017), the Macallan Royal Photographic Society Prize, London, UK (2012), the Citibank Prize for Photography (1999), the Werner Mantz Prize (1994), and the Kodak Prize of the Netherlands (1987).
Partners
